T w e n t y S i d e d

This show looked really interesting in the preview, but failed to deliver once I sat down and watched it. I like bond-esque spy stories, and I even like send-ups of those sorts of stories, and the preview made this seem that way. It wasn’t. On the upside, the series is only four episodes and fits on a single disk, so at least it was over quickly.

Read Or… something else. Don’t be fooled by the opening. This is not a fan service vehicle.

There were just too many ill-fitting elements in here. The main character is a secret agent (agent Paper) who is obsessed with books. She has a gift for manipulating paper in combat. For example, she can take a piece of looseleaf and use it like an edged weapon. She can even throw it and stick it into solid wood. This was an interesting ability, but they took it too far.

Just imagine what she could do if someone introduced her to corrugated cardboard.

She goes on to make paper weapons that can cut metal in half, stop bullets, shield against explosions, and do any number of implausible things. I was even willing to accept that for the sake of the story, but they didn’t stop there. At one point she runs around in a swirl of paper and crafts a gigantic paper airplane. Another agent throws it off the roof to get it going, and from there it is able to keep up with a jet and even engage in a bit of dogfighting.

I’m sorry but I am not buying this.

Whatever.

The enemies are strange as well. They are clones of inventors or leaders from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and they have been “given super powers”. They are called the I-Jin. This seems like a lot of trouble for the villian. His plan seems to be:

1. Steal DNA of famous people who are now dead
2. Clone them
3. Convince them to join in his crazy destroy-the-world doomsday plan
4. Teach them to fight
5. Imbue them with super powers and super weapons
6. Send them to fight the good guys
7. Steal some rare books.

It seems like you could skip the first four steps by just using some of your henchmen instead of cloning famous people. What’s the point?

For the most part the I-Jin ride around in ridiculous ways. They have tons of technology, but still they choose to travel using giant insects and other absurd things

Note to evil masterminds: When acquiring rare books, the lunatic-on-a-giant-friggin-grasshopper method isn’t as effective as you’d think.

The bad guy sends his army of goofy clones to collect books which should be more or less easily available. The most important one is actually for sale in an old bookstore. He could have just bought it, but instead he sends some goofball riding a giant grasshopper to steal it. The resulting battle tips his hand to the good guys. He didin’t even need that army of warriors – all he really needed was a library card and a photocopier.

In the opening moments of the show, an I-Jin gets on top of the white house, blows the crap out of it and sets it on fire, and then asks the President of hte United States, “You there! Is this the library?”

So his plan was to blow up a building and then find out if it was the library? Doesn’t that seem to go against the stated goal of acquiring books from said library? Are we to believe the bad guy took the time to clone and train this I-Jin but never bothered to give him a map of Washington DC? If your supersoldiers are wandering around asking for directions to famous locations, you are doing something wrong.

Of course, no evil plan is complete without a gigantic and heretofore secret floating fortress, and this isn’t the sort of villian to forget a detail like that. His base is many times larger than the largest aircraft carrier ever built. It has massive moving platforms and endless catwalks which are perfect for all the final showdowns that need to take place. We learn that the base is really just a launchpad for an orbital rocket. Apparently he’s also completed his own space program in secret, and plans to launch a rocket that will…

Oh, who cares? It’s gibberish.

How could he afford such a thing? Must have used non-union labor. I’ll bet it doesn’t follow OSHA standards, either.

This show had a lot of style, the characters were interesting, and the artwork was great. But all of that wasn’t enough to carry a story full of holes and contrivances, and filled with implausibe things. There is only so much stuff you can put into one story. A movie about vampires is cool. A movie about space aliens is cool. But a movie where the Predator and the Cylons team up to fight Vampire Superman, a clone of Hercules, and Mecha Abe Lincoln is just goofy, and that’s the sort of mess we have here. Too much unrelated and ridiculous stuff to swallow.

Another note is that the writers are not fans of America, or of George Bush in particular. The Americans march into combat time and again only to be slaughered en masse. (As far as I can tell, they are the only ones who die at the hands of the bad guy. A lot of them die. Thousands. Sometimes this seems to be almost played for laughs.) The U.S. president in the show is an obvious parody of Bush. He has a Texan accent and even mispronounces “nuclear”. He’s also a bumbling fool who pisses his pants not once, but three different times during the show. The series is only four episodes, so they devoted a lot of time to presidential pants-wetting. Nobody is going to accuse this show of being overly subtle.

In the end, the whole thing is a waste of time. It’s worse than a waste of time. It’s contrived and clumsy, preposterous and ill-conceived. The climax is predictable and the ending is lame. This show makes me think that an anime-themed MST3k would be a good idea.

One further note is that this show is different from the 7-disc TV series. Steven watched that and his review suggests that the TV version has many of the same issues.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Otaku has a post on the layout of the town of Glie in Haibane Renmei. It seems some people are suggesting the wall that goes all the way around the city is not a circle. This is hard to imagine. We never see any corners. When Rakka works inside the wall, we see it is a steady curve into the distance. I agree that the wall must be a circle, or else there are corners that we are never shown, despite our many views of the wall. In defense of the non-circle advocates, the views from inside the wall shows a much stonger curve than what the outside view suggests we should. Make of that what you will.

As far as part-time jobs go, cleaning the sides of a massive supernatural wall isn’t that bad. Beats flipping burgers, anyway.

Otaku then suggests that the city must be at the center of the circle. I agree this does make things nice and balanced. Certainly if the wall is as dangerous as it seems you’d want people to live as far from it as possible. I’m confident the city isn’t so off-center that one edge of town would be close to the wall. That just wouldn’t make sense and wouldn’t match what we see in the show.

Although you could make the case that the city is a little off-center. The woods seem to be quite big, and are right next to Old Home. You could make the case that Old Home is the center, with town a little off to one side and the woods on the other. It’s also a very real possibility that the fans are putting more thought into this than the writers did…

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Alex is not enjoying Girl’s High. The show (which I’ve never seen) is full of panty shots and heavy on the fan service. People who are into that sort of thing should be warned that all of this comes at a price: You have to endure the show itself to see it all. This is apparently much harder than it sounds.

I would feel bad for him, but his writeup is so amusing and fun to read that I find myself hoping the next one is even worse. The show is rampant with fan service, and yet seems to have a “people who like this sort of thing are degenerates” subtext going. Not a winning formula.

As an aside: I really, really hate the nosebleed “joke”. In Anime, often there will be a character who’s wound a bit too tight who ends up seeing something exciting (like a teenage alien robot cat girl from the future in her leather & titanium underwear, or whatever) and his pulse rises so much that he gets a nosebleed. It was never funny, and 4,000 iterations and variations of the joke made it even less so. Wow! A cartoon girl with a huge bosom! Now an image of a man with blood and mucus jetting from his face! Now more boobies again!

After the blood and fainting the audience is pretty much done looking at girls in their underwear for a while.

Animator A: “I’ve got it! When he sees the pretty girl he gets so excited that a chestbuster alien launches from his chest, covering his friends in entrails!”

Animator B: “So sexy!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.