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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
Chinese animation season continues.
Super Cube
Boy gets super powers from space cube and fights other dudes. Bog standard fighting show with a pinch of light novel progression fantasy (power levels, skills, levelling up stats and all that). Inoffensive stuff albeit rather bland.
The animation for the bulk of the show isn't anything to write home about, but in a couple of episodes, it goes super hard on the action scenes, at which times it genuinely looks amazing. It's a shame they didn't have the budget to make the rest of the show more on par with this level of quality.
This show also features a (possibily unintentionally) funny 'This is dangerous! Do not imitate!' disclaimer in every scene where the characters do anything remotely risky, like sitting on a ledge, hanging out over a railing or just doing an edgy pose. I still haven't worked out whether this is a serious warning or just a really tongue in cheek running gag, but it's great either way. To add to the comedy, it's completely random whether they bother to show the disclaimer during actual fight scenes where people are beating each other senseless.
For the third point, if I had to guess, it probably has everything to do with complying with Standards and Practices on mainland China's TV and streaming networks.
In a similar comedic scenario, I just watched the Toonami edit of Blue Submarine No. 6, which ran on US television twenty-five years ago this month.
Aside from the usual cell shading over exposed skin, one bit of censorship necessary for children's television was the removal of cigarettes. The main character, Hayami, is a big smoker. There's a couple scenes where he fishes into his pocket, pulls out nothing, touches his lips, and makes a weird expression. It's hilarious!
But I get the reasoning behind the edit. They wanted to get this OVA in the hands of as many viewers as they could, and that was the way to do it. Honestly, after not having seen it in a quarter century, I was surprised by how much I did remember of B-Sub 6. Its sci-fi plot and moral point about forging peace through cooperation really left a lasting impression, so the concessions made in the editing room seem perfectly acceptable to me in hindsight.
Of course, I've now strayed a little off topic, but I guess my point is that maybe the studio is just doing what they can to get their work out the door and into the homes of viewers.
(Oh, okay there's this other scene in B-Sub 6 where Hayami is leaning over a railing and he "sighs" into the wind, except his "breath" starts like two inches from his face. 🤣 Great OVA, tho!)
Finished Chainsaw Man over the weekend. A friend recommended it to me. While I wasn't looking for a shonen...my friend's recommendations thus far have been pretty damn good. So I watched it. And it was GOOD. Giving the recent Chainsaw Man movie a go (sailed the high seas for this one...).
Maybe I'll put down some comments here on both in the future.
Summer Wars
I watched it over the weekend. Oh my gosh, what a fun movie! I can't believe I had missed this one.
Okay, so it's basically, "what if we take War Games, replace Matthew Broderick with Michael Cera, and have Ally Sheedy's character invite him over to her family estate for some rom-com hijinks?" It's actually pretty great!
Kenji Koiso is a high school kid and math genius who got a summer job moderating in the online space of a big Amazon/Google/Facebook amalgamation company called Oz. It's rigorous but will look great on his resume. However, his friend Natsuki Shinohara has invited him to come stay with her for a week at her family's countryside estate. The twist? She wants him to pretend to be her fiancé in order to appease her old-fashioned family, especially her ailing grandmother.
Kenji reluctantly agrees to Natsuki's ruse, but things don't go according to plan. When Kenji's Oz account is hacked and used to bypass that company's security, a major internet outage occurs, leading to chaos across the country. The authorities mistakenly believe Kenji to be involved in a terrorist plot, posting his picture all over the news... which just so happens to be on in the middle of Natsuki's family's living room.
Aside from the real-world setting, there's also some tropey battle scenes within Oz's virtual world, but I honestly felt that they added to the fun, rather than detracted. It's still a really sweet film and it has such a happy ending involving everyone coming together to support each other. Definitely one of my tops!