With everything that's going on in Japan following the 8.9 magnitude earthquake, I just don't find myself much in the mood to be clever about a lousy anime.  Maybe Sunday.

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I'll admit to a general reluctance to recap this episode of Rio Rainbow Gate!.  Let's face it, there's pretty much no way to describe the series as good, and after last week I feared what the production team would bring us.  Our heroine defeated by the forces of evil, her Gates gone, and only two remaining that aren't in the clutches of Cartia?  What idiot would bring themselves anywhere within range of Rio?  Even this production staff couldn't come up with a way to pull that one off.  So what could RRG! bring us this week that would be exciting?  Go ahead, try and figure something out, I'll wait. 

...

Yeah, exactly.  Which explains my reluctance to watch this episode.  It appears even the production staff had problems with it as well, as RRG! ep09 had some technical difficulties that delayed it a day.  Still, I've come this far, I can't exactly quit now.  Y'all can thank me later.

It is a week after the events of last episode.  Rio lost her not-so-epic battle against her turncoat half-sister Rina, losing her Gates in the process.  It also appears that one of the stipulations from an earlier Gate battle were still in effect, so The Owner has lost his Casino Island to the grasping claws of the evil Cartia.  She let him keep Sky Resort, but he's lost his mooring rights to the Island.  No mooring, no resupply, no guests, no business, no money.  Well, at least he managed to set the thing down in the ocean, where it floats quite nicely.  Evil Cartia has also fired everybody who used to work for The Owner.  Oddly, nobody blames Rio for this turn of events, but The Owner.  To be fair, it was pretty stupid to agree to such stakes.  But then, this IS RRG!.  You've gotta expect such things.  When the Usual Suspects confronts him, he's strangely silent.  Another of those remarkable coincidences sends the clumsy Anya sprawling, and...

...his head comes off?  Seems he's been getting so much crepe from the Usual Suspects that he made Linda take his place.  But where is he?  And, if the Usual Suspects have lost their jobs, why are they still wearing their casino outfits?  Couldn't they afford off-duty clothing?  Heck, we know Ella and Illa have regular clothes, we saw them wearing such things back in ep01...

...I guess the production team had a budget to work with back then.  Well, RRG! is hardly the first show to blow their wardrobe budget on ep01, then have to struggle on for the rest of the run with nobody changing outfits.  It's only been recently that we've seen characters actually wearing different clothing every day, after all.  But I digress... where in the world is The Owner?
 
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Posted by: Wonderduck at 01:46 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I so very much want to inflict grievous bodily harm on the production staff of Rio Rainbow Gate! right now.  As I said at the end of Ep07's recap, "...I have this sinking feeling that Rina is going to have a heel turn in Ep08..."  Now, I am many things, but one that I am not is a plot prognosticator.  Usually when I take a guess about how a show is going to go, I'm about as far off as chalk and cheese.  Because of that, trying to figure out plotlines ahead of time is usually an exercise in futility, one that I avoid doing whenever possible.  Yet this stupid brainless pile of drek called RRG! has gotten me so involved that I not only made predictions, but I put them in print to boot.  It's one thing to get hooked on something good; having it happen watching a series that has all the depth of a playing card is just embarrassing.  So, grievous bodily harm it is!  There's quite a wide range of injuries one can inflict with just a playing card, you know.  Anything from a simple papercut, preferably with an application of lemon juice afterwards,  to ocular exenteration, preferably with an application of lemon juice afterward... the sky's the limit. 

And speaking of the sky:

We pick up right where we left off in Episode 07, with Rina bolted down to a roulette table and Rio about to go into her third Gate Battle of the day.  This one will be against evil Cartia's "King Strong Arm".  And what, might I ask, will be the game to be played this time?  I mean, considering some of the matches we've had in the past, I expect it to be something like a wrestling match between Rio and a remote-controlled bear in a swimming pool full of tapioca pudding and deadly holographic space cuttlefish.

Or a coin flip followed by a guess of which which hand the coin is in.  The stipulations are simple: King will flip it, grab it between his hands, then separate them.  At that point, Rio will make her choice.  Of course, it wouldn't be RRG! without there being something stupid involved, and that's certainly the case here.  Y'see, King Strong Arm isn't called King Strong Arm for nothing; he's got a strong arm.  In fact, he's so strong that he can crush a coin to powder in his clenched fist, which he does.  Voila, no coin (which looks like a euro, for you budding numismaticists out there) and no chance for Rio to win!

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Ladies and gentlemen, I have some disturbing news.  It has come to my attention that the anime known as Rio Rainbow Gate!, which we expected to be nothing more than a stupid fanservice vehicle, has instead been attempting to grow a plot.  While hard to believe, I'm afraid that it is also... true.  All attempts to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring have failed.  We have failed.  There is still some hope, however.  The plot, such as it is, is still small and weak, and there is every chance that it will die before it gets too much momentum.  However, for this episode at least, we must proceed with caution.

And then you're reminded that you're watching a show currently taking place in a Sky Resort flying 3000m above the surface of the earth, and suddenly threats like "a plot" don't seem so worrisome anymore.  In fact, today's episode of RRG! is taking place only two hours after the last one.  The evil Cartia is throwing another Gate Battle at Rio, something totally unprecedented in the realm of casino history.  Unsurprisingly, Rio is already exhausted from her fight with Mighty Jack, and is taking a nap in her room.  When she wakes, she has a surprise waiting for her...
 
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The most important thing to take from this episode of Rio Rainbow Gate! is that the shrimp costume has returned, and with a vengeance!

Afro Samurai there on the right is the unluckiest man on the face of the earth.  He's playing Rock-Paper-Scissors with Anya, and has just lost to someone who can only do "scissors".  He's also the stupidest person on the Sky Resort.

Ah yes, the Sky Resort, the flying hotel-cum-water park that was introduced last episode.  We learn that its cruising altitude is 4000 meters, and that there are open-air pavillions where people can stroll around.  At 4000 meters, or 13123 feet.  Now, I've been to Salt Lake City, which is 4226 feet above sea level, and I can attest that there ain't no air there.  Altitude sickness can begin to occur at 2400 meters.  And the Howard Resort is letting their guests walk around outside and unprotected at 4000 meters?  Of course, they do let employees wear friggin' shrimp costumes, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, Rio's been challenged to another Gate Battle.  Wow, what are the odds of that happening, huh?  Go figure!

...and there's her challenger.  Jack Mighty is his name, and he's the latest in a long family line of Bomb Disposal men.  As a result, he has telekinesis (don't think about it too hard; in RRG! it doesn't pay to think about anything).  It turns out that he didn't want to do bomb disposal work and ran away from home... at which point, he was picked up off the streets by...

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:37 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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To be honest with you, I'm a little disgusted with myself right now.  While watching this week's episode of Rio Rainbow Gate!, I came to the startling realization that I'm actually enjoying this startlingly bad piece of drek.  Now, I've never been an anime snob.  I understand that not every show can be true works of art, and that there's a place for those shows that don't have a huge budget or deep characterization or engrossing plot. I'd like to think, however, that when a series is as lousy as this one, I would know enough to point at it and laugh, then consign it to the rubbish heap of history, never to blight my hard-drive again.  So why in Miyazaki's Name do I keep coming back to RRG!, and worse still, look forward to it?

I don't have a problem.  I can stop whenever I want.  Why are you looking at me like that?

This week, Rio has a meeting with The Owner but forgot to get her uniform from the cleaners (she only has one?).  Not wanting to be late, she grabs the outfit nearest to hand...

See, this screencap is RRG! in a nutshell.  Why in the name of all that's holy was a shrimp costume the only piece of clothing Rio had to wear?  And why is it that the other two look so resigned to the fact that Rio is wearing a shrimp costume?  Just what in the world goes on between episodes?  "Oh no, she's got the shrimp costume again... just don't make eye contact and everything will be okay.  It's just a phase..."  Truth be told, that's an episode of RRG! that I really want to watch.  Maybe it'll be an OVA or something, perhaps an omake on the Blu-Rays... and if that last sentence fragment didn't make your blood run cold, nothing will.  Most of Miyazaki's movies aren't available on Blu-Ray without ordering from Japan.  Neither is Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex.  Azumanga Daioh?  Nope. Bakemonogatari?  No.  Black Lagoon?  Not in the least.  But RRG! will surely have a BD release, and probably sell well, tanjdammit.

*ahem*

Sorry, where was I?  Oh, yes, the meeting.  Turns out that The Owner is about to open a new casino on his Casino Island, something called the 'Sky Resort.'  He assigns Rio and her harem to work the grand opening... they're to meet with someone named Linda to get used to the place.

This is Linda... genki girl, distinctive costume, disheveled hair, heavily tanned... yep, she's a native island girl.  And head dealer at Sky Resort.  But she has a secret.

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After the cliffhanger ending of episode 03 of Rio Rainbow Gate!, when a potential rival for Our Heroine arrives on the scene dressed as a chicken-wing delivery girl, I had a horrible thought.  "Could RRG! be developing a plot?  Is this primordial ooze of a show evolving into primordial ooze with small vestigial flipper-like things that may in fact turn into a pair of arms sometime in the distant future?  And could these squishy proto-arms perhaps allow our primordial ooze to operate a word-processing program by flailing at the keyboard randomly until a sequence of words appears on the attached monitor, words that actually form coherent thoughts and plotpoints, thereby accidentally injecting some drama and conflict into our cheesecake?  Could this be happening?"

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Look, lord knows I didn't expect anything from Rio Rainbow Gate!.  If it was lucky, it would just be merely bad.  If it went like I expected, it'd be a massive trainwreck.  If we were truly lucky, it'd go off the rails in some Calvin and Hobbes-style calamity.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:34 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Okay, so production house Xebec decided to make an anime based on a character from a series of pachinko machines.  Well heck, I've heard of stupider ideas I suppose.  I think it's safe to assume that there was some financial assistance forthcoming from the makers of the machines, but if JAXA can sponsor an anime, why not?  The question is, was it money well spent?  Could we have a sleeper hit on our hands, despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction from the usual suspects?



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What makes a favorite?  There should be something about it that keeps bringing you back to it, obviously.  The characters, the story, the drama or the comedy, something.  But lots of shows have great characters, or an outstanding storyline, funny jokes or gripping drama... what makes one series stand out above all others to become a favorite?  And what elevates a favorite to The Favorite?  Sometimes... rarely... the entire package is so outstanding that it's hard to point to one part and say "there, that right there makes it just that good."  And yet, that's the case of my Number One Favorite Anime Series Of All Time.  It's the rare situation where everything is so good that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts... and the parts are all excellent.

Even if it's a show about nothing.

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A favorite show should be like an old friend... someone that you've known for a long time, and that you consider family.  In the case of an anime, it should be something that you could pop in the DVD player and sink back into your chair, pleased that you're watching it.  Maybe you've even got some routine surrounding the series, like you only watch it once or twice a year... but you know, deep inside, that you will watch it, no matter what else is going on.  Maybe you know the show well enough to not even need subtitles (assuming you don't know Japanese).  In short, it's a series that, just by watching, makes you happy and warm inside.

Even if it's about sad girls in snow.

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A favorite show needs to transport you to a different place than your own reality.  That's one of the advantages of the art of animation in general and anime in particular.  Anything you can imagine, and most things that you couldn't, are not only possible, but easy to do.  Giant mecha striding confidently across flaming terrain.  Enormous battleships rising out of the ocean to do battle with massive alien fleets.  Martial artists that make Bruce Lee look like a newborn infant.  Magical energy blasts powerful enough to destroy skyscrapers, called forth by girls in elementary school.  Heroes and heroines of every shape and size, saving the world from the most evil of opponents.  All of these are entertaining, exciting... and commonplace in anime.  To be truly different, a show needs to be outstanding not only in plot and character, but in setting, and not be afraid to tell its story the way it needs to be told, no matter how unlikely it may sound.

Even if the story is that of female gondolieri on Mars.

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A favorite show should be one of those things that fits like a good pair of shoes or well broken-in jeans... comfortable.  You should be able to put on any episode and immediately sink into the backstory like you'd watched everything up to that point in a marathon.  Perhaps it's a seminal moment in your fandom, or something that made the whole concept of what a good anime could do click for you.  In short, a favorite show should be part of you as an anime fan.  Coming in at Number Four on my list is an epically grand story involving secret societies, spans multiple continents, and the whole of the history of Western Civilization, yet at its heart is about nothing more than two young women.

Who happen to be assassins.

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That is all.

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What makes a favorite a favorite?  Ask that question to a dozen people and you'll likely get a dozen different answers.  But just as everybody who watches anime has favorite shows, they'll also have some series that fall just short of that lofty goal, and I'm hardly an exception to this rule.  So before I get into my true favorite series, it's time to look at those that just don't make the cut.  Understand, all of these shows are quite good but have a shortcoming or two that keep it from making it to the top of the heap: Wonderduck's Favorite Anime Series Of All Time.  Without further ado, in no particular order here's the slightly not-as-great shows!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:55 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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In this day and age of anime otakudom, the internet gives you just about anything you could possibly want to ever want to know about every show that's running, has run, or is going to be coming down the pike.  It has also given us the chance to dislike shows even before we see them, and to tell everybody that the shows are awful weeks before they hit the air.  Every season it has become routine to hear the call of "worst season ever!"  These calls are never right.  There are always shows that come from out of nowhere that sound horrible but turn out to be decent, good, or occasionally even great.  It is therefore rare that something sneaks through the vast web of bloggers, websites and twitterfeeds until it is actually released.  I don't consider myself particularly plugged in to the Great Horde, but yet I still seem to know a little bit about just about everything that's coming out every season.

Which is why the Megane no Kanojo OVA has come as such a surprise to me, and I suspect quite a few others... I heard nothing about it prior to the day someone subbed it.  That's a shame, because in this time when cynicism about everything anime is de rigueur, this little show is quite a breath of fresh air.  The OVA consists of four unrelated short (around 10-12 minutes running time without the OP and ED) episodes about, as you may have guessed from the title, girls who wear glasses.  As of the time this is written, UTW has released two of the episodes.

The first one is about the Sempai of a high school Literature Club, and the boy who joins because he saw her without glasses once and thought she was cute.  Shocked and horrified by the fact that she wears glasses constantly, he then spends a year trying to get her to take them off, just once... until she discovers that his eyesight is horrible.  Hijinks ensue.

The second episode is about "Japan's most popular Idol."  In her time off, she puts on a pair of glasses, a different hairstyle, and a floppy cap as a disguise, then sits in a coffeehouse and relaxes... until the day that one of the waiters asks her out.  They go on a date, while she frets the entire time that he knows who she is... until she figures out that he really has no clue, then she frets about the fact that he doesn't know.

There's no way in the world that I'd claim that Megane no Kanojo is a great show.  The art isn't particularly good, the two stories so far aren't particularly deep (to be fair, there's only so much you can do in 10 minutes), the characters are basically stock, and on and on.  But yet, they're refreshing.  There's no pretensions towards great art here, just short stories that are entertaining, friendly and fun.  Ten minutes is about the right length for them; shorter and you won't get around to actually liking the characters, longer and the amount of story the plots can support would run out.  The production team clearly understood this and did the best they could under the constraints they had.  The results turned out pretty good.  Heck, I had a smile on my face after I watched each one, and what more could you hope for from a show like this?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 12:11 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Some time ago, there was a general sense of excitement around The Pond when it was announced that there was to be a Nanoha movie.  Screened in Japan last January, it came out on Blu-Ray just recently, and it took very little time at all for it to be translated and released torrentially.

So how is it?

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1 I'm confused - is there supposed to be video?  All I am getting is sound and a static picture of a girl holding an iPod...

Posted by: Siergen at November 27, 2010 09:07 PM (Gqqsw)

2

It is a static picture, but the sound is the can-can music with what sounds like Japanese chipmunks kind of chanting over it, like the voices were recorded and then sped up 2:1.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 27, 2010 09:13 PM (+rSRq)

3 Actually, that's the character's normal voice.

Posted by: Wonderduck at November 27, 2010 09:50 PM (vW/MM)

4 2444

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 28, 2010 07:51 AM (PiXy!)

5 Um... 1492?

Posted by: Wonderduck at November 28, 2010 08:36 AM (vW/MM)

6 1787 FTW!

Posted by: Brickmuppet at November 28, 2010 05:22 PM (EJaOX)

7 I think it's mostly 24444, not 2444, although there may be a 2444 for a different beat in the middle. Listen to the last one after the music stops for clarity.

Also, guys? 4423.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 29, 2010 12:04 AM (9KseV)

8 Wonderduck - ni-shi-shi-shi.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 29, 2010 04:13 AM (PiXy!)

9 I was watching a live action japanese drama/comedy about an airline.  The plane had to come in for an emergency landing and all the stews were in the back row screaming out instructions in unison, something like bend forward, protect your head, prepare for impact.  I swear to God they were so high pitched and at such a volume they could melt ear wax and burn out nose hair.

Posted by: toadold at November 29, 2010 03:12 PM (aErmb)

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In every anime season, there's always some keepers and some shows that are quite honestly nothing more than crap on a stick.  In this edition of the semi-regular series, "What's Wonderduck Watching?", I'll be pointing you towards a few shows that I think are keepers... and a couple that are crap on a stick.

As always, this post isn't meant to be a comprehensive review of every series out there, nor is it unbiased or even-handed.  It's a look at the shows I'm going to be following this season because I think they're good, and a warning to stay away from a couple of others because I think they're awful.

That being said, let's get on with the program!



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Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:29 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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A new entry into the semi-occasional feature "What's Wonderduck Watching?" will be coming along in the next day or so... except I'm still trying to figure out what'll end up as keepers.  And I need a nap.  So, in lieu of anything involving things like 'content' or 'anything worthwhile,' here's a funny picture.

Oh, and no, Siergen, I haven't forgotten, I'm still researching.  There does appear to be a one-word answer, however: fear.

UPDATE:

...and you thought I was kidding, Gerberette?  Pshaw!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:18 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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