Mega Megane Moé
Hell and Heaven Moéltdown
Posts tagged Minami-ke
My Show Is Better Than Your Show, March Madness Edition
Mar 5th
There seems to be cries every season about how the cropping of shows is worse than the last, and while this may or may not be true depending on your taste in shows, I’ve always found it hard to be lacking in stuff to put up on the screen every night. This is because while there may not be many standout, my-God-I-need-to-watch-this-now shows in every season there are always plentiful bounties of sleeper hits, things worth trying because someone said it was good, or just plain old shows, enough to ensure that I get continually buried deeper and deeper in a pile of anime I need to catch up on.
Perhaps a large part of it is due to the fact that I enjoy being very easily influenced and thanks to that I can pick up random shows if two or three people say it’s actually pretty good – doubly so if they can nail a weak spot of mine – combined with the fact that I really haven’t seen much, having only been in the anime-watching business for just over a year.
To prove that anime Is Out There – cue the X-Files theme – I’m going to spend a little time tonight going over the majority of my watchlist, instead of the huge specialty posts on a single anime which have been written recently. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s mostly code for “I want to talk about True Tears, Clannad, and Shana II but am too lazy to unify it in an easy way” with some bonus laughing at other shows added in.
Since it’s March and all and I like to pretend to be hip and knowledgable about sports (Protip: Motorsports yes, sportssports no.), it’s a super special sweet sixteen – ow, my manliness – March Madness-type organization with, you guessed it, sixteen shows on the list. There are in reality a few more but the majority of the extra would consist of “I saw this once, and would kind of keep watching it if there were nothing else to watch,” which explains itself well enough.
To be fair it doesn’t have the mass-voting aspect or the actual sports-related references of the other March Madness anime posts, but, hey, 16 anime, that’s a lot. Read the rest of this entry »
Track Two: Minami-ke ~Okawari~
Jan 27th
Minami-ke Okawari is the second season of hit show Minami-ke, featuring a different animation studio but all the same characters. Revolving around the daily life of the three Minami sisters, Minami-ke is a slice-of-life show with a strong sense of comedy, mostly physical and occasionally verbal. Haruka is the oldest of the sisters, and is the motherly type – but she has a side that any mafia godfather would be proud of. Kana is the energetic middle sister, and despite acting before thinking most of the time, she can be quite smart, in a manipulative way. And Chiaki is the youngest sister, with a cutting sense of sarcasm mixed in with quite a bit of naivete. All three of these girls deal with very interesting characters in their lives, from gender-bending crossdressing friends, to obsessive stalkers, to just plain amusing personalities at school.
1/27/08: Episode 2
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1/22/08: Episode 1
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Click here for more information on Track Two.
-CCY
Series Review: Minami-ke
Jan 13th
“Haruka-neesama IS amazing.”
Actually, wait, that’s not a quote, nor is that Haruka. Have your pick of catch-phrases for the obligatory quote to kick off the post, then:
“NINOMIYA-KUN!!”
“Bakayarou!” (spelling brutalized)
“SENSEI!!”
“Rare expression!”
“*Hosaka’s extremely strange laugh*”
And I’m sure I’m missing very many. It’s a slice-of-life show that, like many, is simply filled with personality.
One of the shows that many have named as one of the better school life comedies in recent times, what Minami-ke does best is both embracing and breaking the bounds of slice-of-life shows.
Like many, the focus of the show revolves around a bunch of female characters in one place, and their adventures both at school and at home.
Unlike many, there actually are guys in this show, and even if they do get abused all the time like the uncommon male in a slice-of-life, their presence is very real and very central to the show.
Like many, the show relies quite a bit on repeated gags, both of the ‘in rapid succession’ and ‘in every episode’ types; some of which work well, others which do not.
Unlike many, Minami-ke doesn’t shy away from the romance side of things, frequently left unexplored in slice-of-lives. Rather, it makes great fun of it.
Probably the best aspect of this show is the breadth of it. It has a bit of physical comedy, a bit of verbal comedy, a bit of disturbing comedy, and even a few Lucky-Star style sympathetic moments. Characters are introduced nearly on an episode-by-episode basis, and they nearly always come bearing new gags. Minami-ke does a great job of feeling like a contained snapshot of a limitless universe, where the characters were not the only ones in the world.
(And thus, neither did that make them the gods of that world. That review is coming later, I swear, officer!)
It’s tough to gauge whether Minami-ke is truly the best comedy of recent memory, especially because the genre itself seems to be spreading out – there’s dark humor (Zetsubou), the connective shows (Lucky Star), the relaxing shows (ARIA), and so on. Minami-ke feels the closest to what one might call the original school-life comedy roots, with the likes of Azumanga Daioh, and in that slot it functions quite well as a show.
Maybe it’s a bit of a put-down to call it ‘yet another good show from the fall season’, but that’s what it is; not forgettable, by any rates, but not legendary, either. The kind of show that lives on in catchphrases more than moments. And that’s fine.
Oh dear, I’ve concluded the post already, what to do after the jump?
(Oh, and SPOILERS ARE BOSS, even though it’s tough to spoil a show like this.)
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Through Three, Fall 2007
Oct 25th
Oh no! It’s the dreaded but ever-popular “here’s what I think about all the new shows in a season that I’ve barely seen an hour of” post!
Perhaps it’s one that can be considered overdone in the anime blogging world, but it certainly serves a purpose. A blogger’s watchlist can say a lot about their tastes and passions, something that can be helpful when getting a concept behind the words. Not to say to form massive stereotypes on bloggers, but at least once you know the general viewing pattern of a person you can know where to turn when you need your fix of genre-specific fandom.
The seasonal review posts that pop up around the first few weeks of a show are also helpful to those of us who actually don’t have the time to watch every first episode individually (major props to those who can; it’s some serious effort just handling half) and need to gauge popular opinion to see what are some of the unknown shows that went previously under the radar.
As such, it’s a little late but it’s time for one more take on what shows suck, what shows don’t, and why you should listen to me instead of everyone else. Most shows have gotten three episodes in by now (look at the title. Ooh, alliteration, exciting, I know) and that seems a fair enough time to get a reading of the series, especially with the projected 12-episode length of many of this season’s shows.
I don’t plan on directly ranking the shows against each other but rather putting them on an overall barometer of just how much hype a show can build in me; whether it’s more likely that I’ll crash the servers looking for the latest release or whether it’ll pop up months later to remind me that it still exists.
If you’re looking for a take on all 30+ shows I would reccomend one of the excellent summaries from somewhere else, but if you want overly biased harem / romance comparisons (plus one or two oddballs; 8 in total)…welcome home, master.
Yeah, I can’t stand that line at all.
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