mu continuation

I walloped my head last night and have a big ol' bruise for my troubles. Rather embarrassingly, I managed to bash my head whilst sitting down on the toilet. It's a manoeuvre I've executed perfectly and without injuries millions of times before, but yesterday I managed to bang my head on the damn towel rail.

See, I've noticed whenever I injure myself, it's always got an embarrassing element to it. It's like when I did my back in - I trapped a nerve whilst bending down to clean the wheel of my car. Even I'm embarrassed at that and I'm the one that suffered the weeks of constant agony and sleep deprivation that went with it.

Anyway, here's the rest of the summaries for the fansubs I watched:


11eyes

What was surprising about 11eyes wasn't so much what it was and what it was about, it was that I quite liked it.

If I had to guess while I was watching it, I would have said this was adapted from a light novel. Having now had the opportunity to look it up on Google, it actually turns out to be based on a visual novel.

Visual novels are a kind of half way house between properly interactive games and novels. Basically you click through loads of dialogue and events and stuff and then generally there are one or two decision points that allow the game to branch in a particular direction.

The reason I'd have said Light Novel is that 11eyes has that old problem of feeling like a bunch of cool stuff the writer/artist likes thrown together and draped across an overly-familiar plot.

However, where usually this really turns me off, here I found myself enjoying it. Perhaps it's because it's a visual novel so there were subtle differences to the way light novels go about their business. Perhaps I'm simply being worn down by all the adaptations of these types of things there have been recently.

Or perhaps I was simply coming off the back of two really disappointing shows to find something vaguely okay-ish so I didn't hate it.


Hyakko

I wasn't expecting much going into Hyakko. I'd already sampled the OVA that came after this and while it was somewhat amusing it was also a bit of a non-event. I appreciate that this is a slice of life type show, but throughout the entire OAV two characters basically just sat in a shop eating cakes.

Rather pleasantly then, the series has a bit more variety of scenery with more characters at the very least. It's also still definitely a slice of life show set in high school and we've seen loads of them over the years, but Id' say this was a fairly reasonable example of the genre.

I mean, it's not earth-shatteringly good, but equally it's not utterly awful.


Konnichiwa Anne

I've never read Anne of Green Gables. Indeed, I know next to nothing about it.

And confusingly this is not an adaptation of it, although I understand there is one.

According to wikipedia, the original Anne book also had several sequels and this isn't an adaptation of those either. This is an adaptation of a prequel book. A prequel not written by the original author.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head too, but really, that doesn't matter, because you don't need to know anything about those books or who wrote them to watch the show.

I think if I was a child I would really have liked this show. As a very old person I liked what it was trying to achieve but found the actual presentation/style a bit simplistic.

Which isn't to say the stories where simplistic, just that the show has a feeling of being aimed at younger children. Though to be fair, the content is somewhat adult in places - Anne's alcoholic adoptive father hits his wife in several occasions, for example.

And that was the other thing - all bar one of Anne's adoptive family are so unpleasant (both towards her and generally) I kept wanted to get in there and give them a slap (or at the least a damn good talking too) myself.

Perhaps that level of engagement is a hallmark of good storytelling, but in the end I found it somewhat frustrating. Maybe it's the sort of show where the end gives you some sort of closure to those feelings, but odds are I'll never find out.


Durarara!!

And so for the big one.

I'd been kinda saving durarara until last as I'd heard a lot of really good things about it. In particular I'd heard it was similar to Baccano, one of the best shows in recent years.

Well from what I watched (and to cap off this theme of surprises) it didn't seem anything like Baccano.

Baccano does a lot of buggering about in terms of telling its stories in parallel and out of sequence. You can easily slip from 1931 back to 1930 and then forward to 1932 across a handful of scenes. For a simple western analogy it's a bit like Pulp Fiction, where there's a single story that's been chopped into bits and we're watching the bits out of sequence.

Durarara doesn't do that. What Durarara does (well, in the first 2 episodes - I've not seen beyond that) is more similar to Boogiepop phantom, where the same period of time is being covered, but from different people's perspectives. There is a recent western film analogy, but I can't for the life of me recall what it was - I seem to remember it had Matthew Fox of Lost fame in it, though.

The other big surprise is that Baccano is quite high energy. It's got quite a lot of funny stuff in and generally the presentation is an upbeat, brightly coloured one, which contrasts beautifully with the extreme violence and sinister undertones that pervade the story.

Durarara is more straight out dark and moody.

But the thing is I still liked it. Indeed, I think I liked it more because it wasn't simply "Baccano: the remake".