Spring 2010 Anime Season Preview

Ah, the humble sea­son pre­view. Noth­ing takes more time to com­pile nor attract as many hits. I’ve been doing them for the past 6 sea­sons now so I like to think I’m pretty damn good at pre­dict­ing what will be the big hits of upcom­ing sea­sons. Heck, I even have proof.

Fantasy Anime League (FAL). Pre­dict what will be the biggest hits of the sea­son and earn points based on their pop­ular­ity. Out of 186 com­pet­it­ors I came in second place. So yeah, I like to think I’m pretty good at this pre­dic­tion thing.

I com­pletely encour­age any­one to link this pre­view on a forum or wherever but for gods sake do NOT copy and paste the entire thing onto a forum or your own web­site. I swear, this hap­pens more often than you might think.

Senko no Night Raid

Stu­dio: A-1 Pic­tures

Addi­tional Info: Second anime to air in the Anime no Chi­kara timslot, a timeslot devoted to anime ori­ginal projects

Syn­op­sis: The story is set in Shang­hai in 1931, when the Imper­ial Japan­ese Army has been dis­patched to main­land China due to the rel­at­ively recent First Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. In this cos­mo­pol­itan city of intrigue, there is a spe­cial mil­it­ary spy organ­iz­a­tion called “Sak­urai Kikan” that has since been bur­ied in history.

Thoughts: Really look­ing for­ward to this myself. A-1 and Aniplex have had a slow but rel­at­ively suc­cess­ful start with this Anime ne Chi­kara pro­ject of theirs with Sora no Woto but this show looks to be much more up my alley. It’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how well they sidestep the poten­tial dangers of pos­it­ive por­trayal of this period of his­tory see­ing as how the Japan­ese did some pretty hor­rible stuff. Now the staff behind this don’t exactly fill me with joy but anime ori­ginal pro­jects are always worth keep­ing an eye on.

Iron­man

Stu­dio: Madhouse

Addi­tional Info: Based off Mar­vel Comic Book. 12 epis­odes long

Syn­op­sis: Guy builds suit and whoops some badguys ass. Pretty cool stuff eh~

Thoughts: Prob­ably the best part of this pro­ject is that Mad­house have been given total free­dom to adapt this story as they wish. Now I wasn’t that big of a fan of the movie but the story was indeed an inter­est­ing one. Plus just watch that trailer. After a miser­able 2009, this is Mad­house back on form with some slick anim­a­tion. There’s not a whole lot of info on this out there but the name Mad­house com­bined with the prom­ise of action always gets my interest up.

Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei

Stu­dio: Mad­house

Addi­tional Info: Air­ing in the Noit­am­ina timeslot. Based off novel and dir­ec­ted by Mas­aaki Yuasa (Kaiba, Mind Game)

Syn­op­sis: The 2005 novel fol­lows a name­less prot­ag­on­ist who is a third-year col­lege stu­dent. The protagnoist looks back at the earlier years of his col­lege life and his adven­tures with a par­tic­u­lar circle

Thoughts: Yuasa is a nut­ter. Watch his anime and you will see a crazed mind at work. But with each pro­ject he makes he gradu­ally gains con­trol of that clearly bril­liant mind of his. I per­son­ally thought we’ve seen the best out of him with Kaiba and that was his own cre­ation. What makes me inter­ested in this pro­ject though is that he is restric­ted by both the fact he’s been given source mater­ial and the fact it’s a slice-of-life series. This is nor­mally a neg­at­ive strike but restric­tions is exactly what the guy needs. Give him restric­tions and he’ll crate a mas­ter­piece. I’ve also heard that this novel is a damn fine book as well. Plus it’s Noit­am­ina! In fact, this is my most anti­cip­ated anime of the sea­son, although I’m cer­tain that the wacky art style will turn off most people so I’m sure you’ll see plenty of elit­ist blogs com­plain­ing that nobody is watch­ing this. And you should watch this because there is noth­ing greater than obscure Mad­house anime. Ah, isn’t it great to see Mad­house back on form~

Arakawa Under the Bridge

Stu­dio: Shaft

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga by the same author of Saint Young Men

Syn­op­sis: The story is about the strange court­ship of a suc­cess­ful exec­ut­ive in life called Kou and a mys­ter­i­ous woman called Nino who lives under a bridge. It all begins when Kou almost drowns in a river but is saved by Nino. For sav­ing his life, Kou ful­fills Nino’s desire to have a boy­friend. Thus, Kou becomes her boy­friend, but has to live with her under the bridge…

Thoughts: On one hand, I’m get­ting kinda sick of Shaft. Bake­monogatari is look­ing more and more like a one-hit won­der. On the other hand, fuck that, this is going to rock! I’ve read a few chapters and this is one of the most bizar­rely hil­ari­ous pieces in exist­ence and one of the few pieces out there that could prob­ably improve with Shinbo and Shaft at the helm. I hes­it­ate to say this because Shaft have let me down in the past, but this could just be the next great anime comedy.

Rain­bow

Stu­dio:

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: The story of are seven teen­agers in 1955, who have to learn to live together in the same hold in the reform­at­ory of Shio. Con­fined in a hall where suf­fer­ing and humi­li­ation are daily, they are wait­ing for a ray of hope in a dark, incar­cer­at­ing world. It fol­lows their life together and how they move on afterwards.

Scamp: I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance of this air­ing this sea­son and even if it does then there’s a 50/50 chance of it get­ting fan­subbed. So I’m not get­ting my hopes up too high for now. The manga is one of the all-time best selling man­gas world­wide and I assume there’s a reason for that. If it does air I’m going to assume the elit­ists of the anime world are going to sing its praises and whine that it’s not more pop­u­lar. Meh, I have rather strong elit­ist tend­en­cies so I’m mod­er­ately excited.

House of Five Leaves

Stu­dio: Manglobe

Addi­tional Info: Air­ing in Noit­am­ina timeslot. Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: The manga fol­lows the lives of the House of FiveLeaves gang mem­bers in Edo-era Japan dur­ing the height of the sho­guns rule. In par­tic­u­lar, the mas­ter­less samurai Akitsu Mas­anosuke finds him­self des­per­ate for work after being let go by one lord after another for his naïvety. He becomes the body­guard of the House of FiveLeaves gang’s cha­ris­matic leader Yai­chi and dis­cov­ers there is more to the gang leader than his crim­inal activ­it­ies would suggest.

Scamp: First of all, it’s Noit­am­ina. Any­thing in Noit­am­ina deserves to be looked at after its track record. Secondly, it’s Man­globe anim­at­ing Samurai’s. Hmmm, where have we seen that before? This isn’t going to be as action packed as Champloo though and the anim­a­tion looks far from con­ven­tional. After their blip in the road of Sac­red Black­smith, it’s good to see Man­globe doing some­thing proper for a change. I hes­it­ate to get my hopes up too much for this because the author also wrote Ris­tor­ante Para­diso, one of the most yawn-inducing anime of recent times. Still, this is Man­globe X Noit­am­ina. Must always remem­ber the Noit­am­ina tag.

Her­o­man

Stu­dio: Bones

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga by Stan Lee (Spi­der­man and x-men creator)

Syn­op­sis: The story will cen­ter on a boy named Joey who dis­cov­ers a toy robot near the west coast of the United States. Then, the toy becomes Hero Man, a giant robot that Joey pilots against evil threats.

Thoughts: I can’t be the only one out there that can’t take this ser­i­ously, can I? I mean look at that robot. It has the star spangled ban­ner tat­tooed on every­where and a plot descrip­tion that sounds like the most gen­eric piece of crap ever made. Why the hell are you work­ing on this Bones? Are they try­ing to appeal to an Amer­ican audi­ence here? Please don’t tell me Amer­ic­ans are gull­ible enough to buy into this shite.

Angel Beats

Stu­dio: P.A Works

Addi­tional Info: Ori­ginal Anime Pro­duc­tion by Jun Maeda, writer of Key Visual Nov­els (Air, Clannad)

Syn­op­sis: In a world after death, angels fight for their fate and their future. Yuri, the leader of the Shinda Sekai Sensen, rebels against the god who destined her to have an unreas­on­able life. On the oth­er­hand, Ten­shi, the chair­per­son of the stu­dent coun­cil for the world after death, battles against the SSS mem­bers. SSS mem­bers util­ize armed weaponry to battle it out against the angels har­ness­ing super­nat­ural powers.

Thoughts: In a sea­son where I’ve found myself laugh­ing in the face of moe fans because of the rel­at­ive lack of moe shows this sea­son, this is the one that moef­ags are pla­cing their hopes on. To be hon­est, I don’t blame them. Even I’m kinda excited about this after read­ing the syn­op­sis. Most import­antly is that this anime isn’t trapped by hav­ing to stick to a VN (I’m not fully sure about this but from what I could gather, Angel Beats is being released on sev­eral dif­fer­ent medi­ums at once) and anime ori­ginal pro­duc­tions always spike my interest. OK, Key Dorama isn’t really my type of anime, but this has a pretty epic sound­ing plot syn­op­sis and has a Haruhi cos­player with a gun. I can’t help but feel a little bit excited about this.

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou

Stu­dio: Art­land

Addi­tional Info: Based off light-novel series

Syn­op­sis: The story of “love, magic, and battles” revolves around Akuto Sai, a boy who aims to become part of his country’s highest order of magi­cians and con­trib­ute to soci­ety as one of its clergy. On the day he is admit­ted into the Con­stan Magical Academy, his aptitude test pre­dicts the fol­low­ing: “Future Occu­pa­tion … Devil King.” Thus begins his severe school life in which he is resen­ted by his stu­di­ous female class head, desired by a girl with mys­ter­i­ous powers, and guarded by a beau­ti­ful female android.

Thoughts: So, have you watched the trailer yet? Did you see the amount of tits ‘n ass? Yup, this is one of those fanser­vice action harems with as much T&A as pos­sible. They are actu­ally a dying breed in the anime world with only the occa­sional Ikkit­ousen or Queens Blade per sea­son and you’ll rarely get more than 2. There used to be way more but it was over­taken by the moe boom around 06/07. Which is a good thing. The lack of these types of anime that is. Not the fact that moe took over.

Work­ing!!

Stu­dio: A-1 Pic­tures

Addi­tional Info: Based off 4-koma

Syn­op­sis: Set in a fam­ily res­taur­ant in Hokkaido, the north­ern pre­fec­ture of Japan, 16 year old high school stu­dent Takanashi Souta works part-time along with his strange co-workers: Tane­shima Popura, a high school girl who’s a year older than Souta who’s eas­ily mis­taken for a elementary/middle schooler, and Shir­afuji Kyoko, the 28-year old store man­ager who doesn’t bother to do any work at all.

Thoughts: It’s utterly impossible to tell how well a 4-koma will adapt into anime form. I flicked through a few chapters and I was totally incap­able of sum­mon­ing any enthu­si­asm for it (maybe that’s just com­pared to the fant­astic Arakawa manga) but, like every single thing in exist­ence, will work bet­ter in anime form (mwa­hahaha, go my biased views, go!). How well it will adapt I have no idea and the staff are a mixed bunch. It’s worth giv­ing a shot I sup­pose but it won’t be a world beater or anything.

Giant Killing

Stu­dio: Stu­dio Deen

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: In Giants Killing a ragtag bunch from East Tokyo are strug­gling in Japan’s top foot­ball league. The team is going through an abysmal spell right now where they are near­ing the bot­tom of the table and have lost 5 matches in a row. The loses haven’t done much to team moral, because it was already low. Fan sup­port, on the other hand, is look­ing bleak. In the world of foot­ball, once the fans turn on a team the end is near. Teams don’t recover. Coaches are fired, play­ers are sold, and teams drop to smal­ler divi­sions where profits often pre­vent them from ever being suc­cess­ful against even mediocre top divi­sion pro­grams. East Tokyo United, ETU, can only blame their coach right now. And Coach is ready to give up this next game to prove to his team and fans, that against the biggest club in the nation he can make this team win

Thoughts: A foot­ball anime (to any Amer­ic­ans out there, this means rest-of-the-world foot­ball kthxbye) where the focus is actu­ally on the coach, some­thing that’s got­ten me pretty damn inter­ested in this. I love foot­ball and this is all about tac­tics, which is even more awe­some. I’ve heard some very good things about the manga it’s based off  but best of all, I’ve heard the main char­ac­ter being described as sim­ilar to Jose Mour­inho, which is a guar­an­teed way to ramp up my interest in any­thing. OK, Deen are hardly as good as Mad­house but I’m still look­ing for­ward to this

B Gata H Kei

Stu­dio: HAL Film Maker

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: Yamada is a vir­gin high school stu­dent who dreams of hav­ing 100 cas­ual sex part­ners. How­ever, she ends up tar­get­ing and pur­su­ing only one boy

Thoughts: I thought the syn­op­sis was actu­ally kinda funny myself. I mean, if you were to swap the gender around and it’s a guy aim­ing for that would people still be as put-off by it? On the other hand, the staff are crap and the manga is meant to be crap so I don’t have any real hopes for this anyway.

Kaichou wa Maid-sama!

Stu­dio: JC Staff

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: A romantic com­edy that cen­ters on the stu­dent coun­cil head named Misaki Ayuz­awa who des­pises the mostly male, slov­enly pop­u­la­tion at her school, which was once an all-boys school. How­ever, Misaki’s most hand­some school­mate just dis­covered her secret — that she works after­school at a maid café.

Thoughts: A very pop­u­lar shojo manga being adap­ted, rather oddly, by JC Staff. Now I don’t know about you but I can already sense that there’s some pretty annoyed fangirls out there by how JC are adapt­ing this. Judging by the promo art and trailer, they seem to be try­ing to spread the pop­ular­ity of this show by high­light­ing the hawt maids as well as the bish­ies, draw­ing in both a mail and female audi­ence. This could back­fire and appeal to neither audi­ence so it’s going to be inter­est­ing to see fan reac­tions to this. Now I couldn’t care less about shoujo so I’m not really bothered about this but most other people do so keep an eye on it.

Hak­u­ouki

Stu­dio: Stu­dio Deen

Addi­tional Info: Based off PS2 game

Syn­op­sis: The prot­ag­on­ist, Yukimura Chizuru is the daugh­ter of a doc­tor who works in Edo. The father leaves Edo to work as a volun­teer doc­tor and moves to Kyoto without his daugh­ter. As time passes by, Chizuru starts wor­ry­ing about los­ing con­tact with her father, so she decides to go to Kyoto in search of him. On the way, Chizuru is attacked by few crim­in­als and wit­nesses a fight between an oni and the Shin­sen­gumi. Tak­ing her into cus­tody and sav­ing her, the Shin­sen­gumi debate on what to do with Chizuru when they dis­cover that she is the daugh­ter of the doc­tor they are also look­ing for. So they decide to become Chizuru’s pro­tect­ors and help her look for her father(the doc­tor). Lots of events hap­pen while she stays with the Shin­gensumi, as they dis­cover mys­ter­i­ous secrets and also fight against the Bak­u­matsu group. The story is over­all romantic with a his­tor­ical and polit­ical background.

Thoughts: Based off a game. Interest in anime prac­tic­ally non-existant. Game based anime have a 98.5% chance of being rub­bish and they are odds I’m will­ing to bet on.

Uragiri wa Boku no Namae o Shitteiru

Stu­dio: JC Staff

Addi­tional Info: Based off manga

Syn­op­sis: Sak­urai Yuki is a mys­ter­i­ous boy with a mys­ter­i­ous abil­ity. He was found in the bushes as a baby and adop­ted by his cur­rent fam­ily. Because of this, Yuki strives for inde­pend­ence. The last thing he wants is to be a bur­den to any­body. Fur­ther­more, when he touches oth­ers, he can feel their emo­tions. Unable to con­trol his abil­ity, he often made insens­it­ive blun­ders in the past. With death threats and his abil­it­ies increas­ing, what will hap­pen when a man claim­ing to be his older brother appears?

Thoughts: Just because I love Hetalia doens’t mean I have now developed an interest in gay anime. Plenty of ang­sty bish­ies in this one with lots of yaoi to mas­turb­ate to (I guess you don’t call it fap when it’s women). Knock your­self out fangirls.

Mayoi Neko Overrun!

Stu­dio: AIC

Addi­tional Info: Based off light novels

Syn­op­sis: The story revolves around Tak­umi Tsu­zuki, a boy who lives with his older “sis­ter” Otome, although the two have no blood ties between them. Otome man­ages a run-down con­fec­tion­ery store called Stray Cats. One day, Otome picks up a mys­ter­i­ous beau­ti­ful girl off the streets.

Thoughts: The order of these anime is how they appear on Chart­f­ags Amaz­ing Chart. He has a habit of order­ing them in the order he is inter­ested in them. Chart­fag has fairly sim­ilar taste to me. Neither of us are that inter­ested in this anime. Try watch the trailer with all those bleed­ing nyaa~ sounds going off the whole time.

Kiss x Sis

Stu­dio: Feel

Addi­tional Info: Had OVA series before anime. Was made spe­cific­ally to attract inces­tious pedophiles

Syn­op­sis: Keita has two older step-sisters, Ako and Riko, but since they aren’t related by blood, they love him in a lust­ful way. After a mis­hap at school, Ako and Riko finally con­fess their love to him. Keita dis­likes the thought of see­ing them other then brother and sis­ter, but as he tries to enter the same school as his sis­ters, he slowly becomes attrac­ted to them.

Thoughts: Appar­ently not a hen­tai, even though I’m pretty sure thats a wet camel toe I can see. Actu­ally I take that back. Two wet camel toes.

Sequels

Ook­iku Furika­butte 2

Stu­dio: A-1 Pictures

Thoughts: I still haven’t got­ten around to watch­ing this yet although I cer­tainly plan on doing so some­time soon.

K-ON! 2

Stu­dio: TrollAni

Thoughts: *decides to keep quiet this time around*

Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow

Stu­dio: Toei Animaton

Thoughts: .…has any­one ever heard of this?

Movies and OVA’s

The Gun­dam Uni­corn OVA is out already but the next one isn’t out until Autumn so a bit of a long wait there. Black Rock Shooter is some­thing many people were excited about, includ­ing me, until I found out it was only an OVA. Hence, I’m not expect­ing much more than a glor­i­fied music video. For movies, it gen­er­ally takes 3–5 months from screen­ing in cinema’s to dvd so anti­cip­at­ing any movies com­ing out in theatres now is point­less. I’m the most excited about Eden of the East: The King of Eden myself, which is com­ing out on BD on 24^th March. But that’s the only date I know. The Macross Fron­tier movie should be out soon. There’s also upcom­ing Fate Stay/Night Movie and Magical Girl Lyr­ical Nan­oha movie, neither of which I have any interest in but I’m sure have their fans. Unfor­tu­nately, we prob­ably won’t see The Dis­s­apear­ence of Haruhi Suzu­miya until the sum­mer though.

Sources

ANN, MAL, Moetron, Chartfag’s amaz­ing chart, Manga­fox, Mangaup­dates, Animesuki for­ums and a whole load of other places I can’t remem­ber. For other worth­while sea­son pre­views, there’s Metan­orn (fangirly but with plenty of info and I got most of my trail­ers from them), Star Crossed (who has finally returned to doing sea­son pre­views again), Bok­uta­chi no Blog ( I miss doing those joint sea­son pre­views…), THAT (the guys who I ori­gin­ally moddled my sea­son pre­views off), Rab­bit­po­ets (2 people chip­ping in this year) and Caraniel (there’s always a new­bie each sea­son that sur­prises me). I’ll update this every now and then whenever a worth­while sea­son pre­view comes along.

Over­all Thoughts

Unusual lack of moe any­one? Some­thing I’ve been see­ing quite often when people are talk­ing about this upcom­ing sea­son is the moefag response of ‘K-ON 2, Angel Beats, Black Rock Shooter and noth­ing else’. Frankly, I’m delighted at that. There’s a lim­ited amount of moe but the very few that are being pro­duced are of the highest moe qual­ity. K-ON is the abso­lute highest in terms of light ‘n fluffy moeblob while Angel Beats is ser­i­ous moe that even I’m quite excited about. Toss out an exper­i­mental OVA or two like BRS and you have moe the way it should be: A niche genre rather than the mar­ket flood­ing we’ve seen in recent years. That doesn’t mean I’m enthralled by this sea­son either. There’s no obvi­ous big wide-audience hit like Dur­arara even if the spread of titles is even. There’s easilly enough to keep one inter­ested no mat­ter what genre of anime you like but noth­ing for all of anime fan­dom to go wild over.

Any­way, some final rankings:

Highly Anti­cip­ated: Senko no Night Raid, Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei, Arakawa Under the Bridge

Anti­cip­ated: Iron­man, House of Five Leaves, Angel Beats, Giant Killing

Pos­sible: Rain­bow, Work­ing, Kaichou wa Maid-sama!

Unin­ter­ested: Her­o­man, B Gata H Kai, Hakuouki,

Crap: Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, Uragiri wa Boku no Namae o Shit­teiru, Mayoi Neko Over­run!, Kiss X Sis

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