Greeting, this is genericindivdual, and welcome to my first ever post on this blog. Over the coming months, weeks and days (or until whenever it is I get bored) I’ll be producing blog posts on the subject of anime, manga, jpop, just like the million other anime blogs out there.

What makes us special here at Activecore, I hear you ask?

Swearing. Britishness. Cynicism. Abysmal grammar and spelling. All that and more.

But anyway. As we all settle into the new year of anime – relaxing into our favourite chairs to begin another 12 months of horrifically poor h-game conversions, criminally bland mecha nonsense and puerile harem comedies I wouldn’t urinate on if they were on fire and carrying children – there’s nothing better to do then reflect back on 2007.

So, ladies (optimistic, I know) and gentlemen, join me as we take a very brief look back over the year that was. Erm.. of anime.

Death Note

This superlative supernatural crime thriller was probably one of the most hotly anticipated shows of 2006, and it didn’t disappoint. Madhouse did a fantastic job here, marrying slickly expensive animation with a atmospheric music score to create a show that manages to achieve spine tingling tension through (basically) dozens of episodes of talking and writing things down in notebooks.

Certainly a show with several faults – it’s complex story begins to seriousley unravel in the final third, with absurdly comic books characters popping up left, right and centre while the show, struggling for ideas, sprints madly from plot twist to plot twist hoping that nobody spots the massive gaping plot holes in the road.

The whole show also suffers from a serious problem in keeping a consistent tone, with what initially seems to be a fairly low-key affair full of understated character performances descending continually into crazed, hammy over-acting and cringe inducing comedy. Indeed, one of the scenes right at the end of the show, in which Mamoru Miyano (as Light Yagami) and Masaya Matsukaze (as Mikami Teru) appear to be in a totally ludicrous battle to see who can over-act the most, probably ranks as one of my favourite comedy moments of anime in 2007.

Despite all that though, Death Note is a brilliant piece of work. Dark, unique and cleverly plotted, this deserves your attention.

Nodame Cantabile

A lovely romantic comedy from the creators of the awesome Honey & Clover, this show was a joy to watch. A fairly simple joy, mind – Nodame Cantabile seems content to play it almost totally for laughs, avoiding many of the darker themes that Honey & Clover dealt with so well. It was fun, cute, mildly amusing and full of classical music.

If anything puts a dampener on my enthusiasm for this show, its that it seemed to lack any real sense of pace. The show seemed to just calmly proceed through 24 episodes of the lives of the students at a musical college before… kinda stopping. While I can say for certain this show was almost totally absent in poor episodes, it was similarly absent in dramatic highs or memorable scenes. It just mumbled along. As I said, fun. cute. But, sadly, not much more.

The Skullman

Dreadfully disappointing action show, in which a couple of journalists hunt for a (skull)mask wearing assassin in an odd, alternate 1950’s world strangely full of monsters. Awesome animation, an addictive themetune and some beautifully choreographed action didn’t disguise that this was a real mess of a show.

The plot was told with an irritating lack of skill – lazy, constant foreshadowing in some ill-judged attempt to build “mystery” meant that half the show was simply full of men in suits talking in meaningless cirlces trying to sound enigmatic. The rest of the show consisted of frankly embarrasing attempts to be highbrow, with the names of great philisophers banded about with little real thought. Occasionally, a fight broke out.

Messy, confusing and deeply in love with itself, Skullman is a big let-down, saved only from total disaster by simply how gosh-darn expensive it looks.

Claymore

Stupid, stupid shonen fighting epic, in which Claire, one of a race of white-haired, demon fighting sword wielders known as Claymores, wonders around the countryside stabbing things in an attempt to get revenge on the creature that killed her (sort of) mother.

Claymore makes a great first impression, with a dark dirty fantasy world and vicious, bloody fight scenes that puts you in mind of Berserk more than it does the rest of the dross that is churned out by the Shonen Jump man-manga-machine.

But – christ – how quickly it all falls apart. The show rapidly becomes annoying, plunging into an endless cycle of pointless multi-episode story arcs that all turn out to be about nothing. The show also acquires Raki, a teenage boy who Claire takes on as her cook. He turns out to be one of the most annoying, whiney, punchable creations of modern television history, and drags the entire show down with him into a miasma of reused animation and even more reused dialogue.

Things reach a kind of glorious low towards the end, with some of the worst closing episodes i’ve had the pleasure to see in some time. Claire, now turning into a monster for reasons too dull to relate, storms about the battlefield, apparently reduced to only speaking in Shonen Jump catchphrases like “You… i’ll never forgive!” while Raki cries and continually declares that he will “become stronger… to protect his precious people!” over and over again like he has a mental illness.

And lets not even get started on the horrific Sunday school morality at the end when it comes to the matter of Claire’s final revenge… dreadful.

Darker Than Black

This is more like it. Stylish, violent and morally murky action show set in a near-future Japan in which the existense of a kind of reality-bending area of dead space causes the rise of individuals with super powers. Great animation, stunning fight scenes, a Bebop-esque cast of misfits with shady pasts and a jazzy Yoko Kanno soundtrack tells you all that you really need to know.

If anything fouls up Darker than Blacks intoxicating mix of stylish action, espionage and unexpectedly good comedy its probably it’s ending. Sadly DTB, like so many shows before it, slips into the old trap of having everything end via some needlessly cryptic, glowing, floating, inside-the-main-characters-mind thingy that leaves you feeling vaguely unsatisfied and kind of wishing it had just ended with the main character shooting everyone in the face. Sadly, it seems, that seems to be the curse of this post-Evangelion era of anime we live in.

It’s all about the bloody mystical bullshit.

Lovely Complex

LoveCom was a… curious romantic comedy revolving around the romantic problems that naturally occur when a tall girl fancies a short boy. Yes.

A show about very little that stretched itself out for 24 episodes by simply having the same events occur over and over, there really isn’t a great deal to say about LoveCom. The two main characters are likeable in their way, and large amounts of the show can be watched on auto-pilot without needing to think or engage your brain in any way.

Defeated by its own sheer genericness, LoveCom is a show that does nothing spectacularly wrong, mostly due to the fact that it does nothing at all. I much more highly recommend the live-action movie version of Lovely Complex, which zips through the entire minor-embarrasing-social-issue-blown-out-of-all-proportion in two hours, and is generally much funnier and to the point.

(Tune in soon for part 2 of our exciting 2007 postmortem, containing many exciting, carefully chosen words. Words like “despair”, “loli-fodder” and “chocolate cornet”)