Fog is my name and I like to play with my life in so many ways, that’s what they say!

Broadcast as recently as 2002, yet widely unknown and unlicensed, Secret of The Cerulean Sand is a fun, period-set adventure show filled with Vernian Airships and Miyazaki-style colourful, family orientated action.

Cerulean Sand is the story of Jane Buxton, a young girl growing up in a rich, English aristocratic family who ends up on a globe trotting adventure after her scientist brother goes missing – presumed dead – in ‘The East’ (it’s never exactly specified where in the East this is) while desperately searching for a legendary ‘floating liquid’ that can make the construction of all sorts of man-made flying machines possible.

So, bringing along only her butler, a dog and more unrelenting optimism than seems healthy, Jane sets off to locate her Oni-sama. The show can pretty much summed as an old fashioned adventure story – after a fairly slow start made up overly nice encounters with nice people on trains, Cerulean Sand eventually develops in to fast-paced action show, filled with sand-pirates riding deadly jet sleds, huge steam-powered airships carpet bombing small towns, and double-crossing aplenty. For the sheer amount of fairly exhilirating action that occurs (especially towards the end where, for a family show, things become suprisingly brutal) Cerulean Sand can be recommended.

The proviso here being, of course, that the reader realise that Cerulean Sand is most definitely a family show. Stylistically, it has more than a little in common with Miyazaki’s classic Future Boy Conan and Hideaki Anno’s similarly awesome Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, but without the true kinetic artistry of the former or the more dramatic, adult edge of the latter. That is not to say Cerulean Sand is without its own artistic merits – it’s brilliantly animated, expressive, and manages the extraordinary feat of including CGI airships that don’t look entirely shit – but it doesn’t quite have that stamp of brilliance which makes Conan or Nadia what they are.

In fact, more than either Conan or Nadia, what Cerulean mostly reminds me of – and possibly part of the reason I enjoyed it so much – is the cartoons I used to watch as a kid. There’s shades of the charming Around the World with Willy Fog or that masterpiece of 80’s television Mysterious Cities of Gold here – action packed, fun and unpretentious. This is just high adventure, kids getting in crazily dangerous situations, the joy of travelling, seeing the world and soaring through the sky.

On those terms Cerulean Sand can be enjoyed immensely, like a nostalgia trip for something you’ve never actually seen before… definitely worth checking out.

Clannad – Oh gods, it’s gone all harem on us

- We couldn’t be bothered to blog episode 16 as it was criminally arse.

Here at ActiveCore, we have a policy on blogging. If blogging requires even the slighest effort, then don’t do it. To this end, episode 16 of Clannad was skipped due to laziness and the fact that there was really nothing to talk about.

But, for completeness sake, here’s my blog report for episode 16:

They played basketball. The reason why made no sense whatsoever. Eventually, it ended.

That out the way, on to episode 17:

This weeks Clannad was interesting in that it was the show really starting to, erm… show it’s true colours. The style of narrative is taking a definite split from the Kanon and Air territory, and into the realms of more standard harem comedy. So this episode we see our hero Okazaki being pulled back and forth by the three generic pretty girl leads who all seem to fancy him, while he mopes after his friend Nagisa-chan, who fainted at the beginning of the episode from the sheer effort of talking to an adult.

Bless her dumb, pretty girl cotton socks.

So it’s standard harem cliche stuff, with all the things you’d come to expect from that most insipid of television genres – We have the girl coming to Okazaki’s house so he won’t be late to school (which could only have been more cookie-cutter harem if she’d said “Oni-chan! you’ll be late for school!”) , various girls seemingly tripping over eachother so they can make him his lunch and, lastly, getting locked in a gym equipment storage shed with a girl.

(As an aside, the fact that anime characters are forever getting locked inside gym equipment storage sheds with pretty girls seems ludicrous in the extreme. In all the schools I attended in my youth, not *one* of them had doors which could be locked simply by closing them from the outside. You needed to lock it with a key which you got from the teacher, who would never lock the door without checking that nobody was inside. Maybe they just do things differently in Japan…)

..Anyway. Episode 17 is pretty much a failure then. Some of the Clannad comedy is in there, but its sandwiched between so much yucky anime fantasy bullshit – pulled off with little charm or original spin to it – that the whole episode just feels distinctly hollow, cynical and un-Kyo-Ani-ish.

Un-Kyo-Ani-ish is not a word.

So as a change in direction goes, it’s a bit disappointing to me. The Kanon/Air approach to story – with the main character wandering around on his own, spontaneously coming across various people and helping them with their problems like some sort of cross between David Carradine from Kung-Fu and Stairway to Heaven – was certainly flawed and often massively underdeveloped, but at least it was…. unique, somehow.

With the close of the Kotomi story arc, Clannad seems to be sliding into bog-standard harem in a way that is just uninteresting to me. Sure it’s a lot more of an ensemble piece – I know its one man show approach was one of Kanon’s major criticisms – but when that ensemble is made up of boring people re-enacting anime tropes over 20 years old, you can’t help but lose interest.

Seriously, make Haruhi season two already.

Gallery Fake – Love in the twisting labyrinth of Paris

- Making stamps and dolls exciting since 2008

Episode 14 of Gallery Fake is yet another addition to what is turning out to be a brilliant run of episodes in what i’m now officially dubbing The Best Show You’re Probably Not Watching. This week Fujita heads off to Paris, where Sara – his partner/girlfriend/middle-eastern royalty type – becomes obsessed with delivering a 20 year old love letter found stuck inside the frame of an old painting.

Over the course of their search for the truth they find themselves exploring the old shopping arcades in the passages that criss-cross the back alleys of Paris, uncovering Cold War intrique, drug deals, precious ancient antiques and the loneliness from a 20 year old broken promise…

Once again this is Gallery Fake at its best. There’s a clear affection for Paris here, and this episode manages to capture the beauty and mystery of that ancient place despite the shows always iffy animation quality. From the winding back alleys to the banks of the Seine at sunset, we get a mix of tourist travel guide, art history, Cold War thriller and love story all rolled into one. It’s a thoroughly complete episode, and doesn’t suffer from the random under-developed side plots or pointless, mis-judged comedy that this show is sometimes prey to. And, of course, no GIANT SNAKES this week either.

Well, next weeks preview promises a duel between Fujita and an undercover British police officer over the black market sale of a long lost portrait. If that prospect doesn’t at least have you interested, then you obviously have no soul at all, and should probably rush off back to your next episode of Spice and Wolf and the loving embrace of mindless fox-girl nudity doing a poor impersonation of entertainment.

For the rest of us, cross your fingers and hope that the subs keep coming. As ever – show your support.

Let’s get brewing!

Moyashimon is an odd show. Deeply odd. Set at the Tokyo Agricultural Univeristy – a real place, apparently – it concerns the ‘adventures’ of Tadayasu Sawaki, a student with the unusual ability to see germs and microbes. But not, however, germs and microbes in the icky under-a-microscope sense. The germs Sawaki sees are cute, have smiley faces and talk a bit like Tachikoma tanks.

Sawaki ends up hanging around with a strange bunch of scientists and campus slackers, all under the command of a Professor Itsuki Keizo, who’s first scene in the show involves him sucking the blood out of a seagulls anus.

Yes.

So, it really is all abit unusual. Sawaki’s gift/curse/condition doesn’t exactly lend itself to high drama or action, and so the individual episodes of Moyashimon tend not be about much. Sawaki see’s germs. People get surprised about this, often entertaining various ideas of how they can make money out of it. Invariably, most situations end with the main characters getting heavily drunk.

It’s a mix of edutainment (the show has exhaustive amounts of detail on various microbes and their effects on, chiefly, sake brewing) and comedy, with Sawaki’s ability to see the real disgusting grime on every person and in every room leading to bouts of screaming, panic, and whole buildings getting constantly quarantined and decontaminated.

Aside from the microbe business, the comedy here is strange enough to be funny, but no deliriousley mad-cap enough to be annoying (like, say, Excel Saga). At various points Sawaki does battle with the horse riding, fan-wielding student council, gets chased around a field by american football players, and sticks his hand up a cows arse.

It has a serious side of coure, but Moyashimon’s underlying messages about the uncertainty of youth and the need to find direction in life are familiar territory for college-set anime. Moyashimon pulls it off well, however; never diving into melodrama, and focusing more on the quirky, silly side to student life than the tough stuff.

Indeed, even the nature of the characters relationships is handled with a preference towards the slightly absurd and the unusual. Simply Moyashimon seperates itself from normal genre conventions: there’s no “love interest” here, no “desperately suffering loner”, no true, dedicated friendships even. The characters in Moyashimon just know each other, sometimes vaguely get along, and sometimes come into bizarre conflicts which bounce off eachother and spin in wild, mad directions often fueled by booze and the need to get laid.

The microbe thing is great – it’s cute, informative and certainly original – but even without it Moyashimon stands up well as a decent little character-led comedy with a manic sense of humour and fun dialogue covered in lashings and lashings of alcohol.

Recommended.

Bonus Feature: Includes Series Impressions Thus Far!

- Sneak Preview: They’re not good!

Odd that my first post about Clannad here on ActiveCore would start on episode 15, but rest assured i’ve been quietly watching this since its started, following the ’story’ and characters as they’ve developed thus far. As we’re just over halfway through Kyoto Animations latest project, it seems now would be a good time to chat about the show and take stock of things so far.

But first episode 15 itself.

Gods…

Clannad is at its most boring when attempting the sort doe-eyed, soppy schoolgirl melodrama that anime seems to specialise in. Even worse is in this episode – blatant filler if i’m any judge – in which they attempt to create drama out of something thats less dramatic than my commute into work every morning.

So this week: Our hero Okazaki discovers that Generic Girl A is having trouble setting up the Theatre Club, despite now having acquired Generic Girl B, Generic Girl C and Generic Tsundere Girl D into its ranks. The problem? They need a teacher to supervise the club, and the only remaining teacher currently not looking after a club is desperately needed for the also-soon-to-be-revived Choir Club, led by Generic Girl E and Generic Evil Bitch F.

Christ.

It makes you wonder why you aren’t just sitting and watching season six of 24 like a regular adult.

The drama is of course boring as is possible without physically encasing the audience in ice. Despite KyoAni’s always admirable dramatic directing techniques, the characters generic, bland personalities slide off eachother to create a 20 minute non-event about nothing.

As ever, what saves this episode of Clannad is probably the comedy. The sequence in which Sunohara continually follows Okazaki around the school with a basketball is a laugh, as is yet another of Okazaki’s fuck-with-the-bland-cute-idiot-girls minds sequences in which he pretends to be somebody else over the phone, only to have the girl in question believe him.

Verdict for episode 15: “I’m sorry, but i’m not able to love men”

Which brings us neatly (or not) to my thoughts on Clannad as whole now we’ve all made it this far: it just doesn’t work. By way of comparison with the other Key game adaptions, i’d say it far superior to the muddled mess of Air TV, but just not in the same league as Kanon, which I enjoyed immensely.

Why? Well – lets get this straight first – I think Clannad, Kanon and Air all have atrocious storylines. Their stories are terrible bland caricatures of anime drama, filling the screen with pretty but horrifically dull schoolgirls who have one massively unexplored TOKEN EMOTIONAL PROBLEM which the hero then helps them with because he’s a cold, handsome loner with a heart of gold, and because the whole yarn is just a dreadful piece of otaku wish-fulfillment disguised as entertainment.

That out the way, what made Kanon work was just how totally beautiful it was. Yes, the world, characters and situations were all naff (or at least horribly melodramatic) but the show was animated with a kind of ethereal beauty that somehow looked *nicer* than reality. Even Air TV, bizarre schizo show that it was, had that almost surreal beauty generated from the blazing summer sun that baked down on everyone and everything.

Clannad has… nothing. It’s plain. Normal. Surprisingly for Kyoto Animation, whos works are usually so full of life and charm, the world of Clannad has been constructed with a degree of generic blandess and lack of detail thats just unentertaining. I don’t hate it, but without Kanon’s beauty, or even Air’s bat-shit insanity, Clannad just feels like nothing. For 26 episodes.

Just hurry up and make Haruhi season 2 already.

Gunslinger Girls – Il Teatrino – Episode 03 – Fight! Fight! Fight!

- Hot Girl on Literary Metaphor Action!

My love/hate/vague indifference relationship with Il Teatrino continues with our 3rd episode in the series. This week the plot starts proper with inexplicably cool, suit wearing child assassin Triela and her greasy haired keeper Hillshire going out in search of a missing Section 2 agent.

First, because i’m nice that way, the positives:

Triela seems to be the only character to come through the recasting process unscathed. Maybe its simply due to her fundamental coolness, but Triela remains an endlessly watchable character, even after the horrid voice changing and character design nastiness that has occured. The scenes that made up a majority of the episode – Triela eating in a fancy restaurant, snooping about the town and blushing like the cute schoolgirl the new production team seem to think she is – were all fine. I might even go as far to say fun to watch.

Of course, the dramatic climax to this episode was the inevitable clash between her and oh-so-serious pretty boy killer Pinocchio. This, sadly, is when everything starts to fall apart…

I’d almost forgotten just how cheap Il Teatrino is compared to season 1 or, really, most other anime this season. The fight scene in this episode struggles with its pea-sized budget and, in a desperate attempt to create the feel of a dynamic action scene, the animators are reduced to:

Whoooooossssshhh!!!

Action lines! and boy, do they love using them! Every punch, every kick, every slow walk forward (seriousley) is accompanied by crazy flashy borders travelling up the side of the screen like they’ve just activated a bonus in Rock Band.

SSSSSwwwwoooooossssshhH!!

It’s a cheap, horrible effect that just stinks to heaven of cheesiness and silliness. It doesn’t ruin the episode or anything – not really – but… god…

The only thing that could make this cheesier is if it was accompanied by a Six Million Dollar man style “ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaaa” noise

Look at it!

This isn’t 1968!

What sort of animation is this?.

Gunslinger Girls – Il Teatrino – Pinocchio

- A step in the right direction…

First of all, it should be known that todays Gunslinger Girls blogging will be a lot shorter than intended due to me having injured one of my fingers, making it extremely hard to type. Astonishingly, I actually managed to injure myself with a *business card*. Just goes to show that being some guy working in an office can be just as hazardous as being an international assassin.

Now thats out of the way, on with the episode.

Awesomely, episode 2 of Il Teatrino sees the show taking a massive step in the right direction, taking the time to slow it down and build up some characters and inject the show with some much needed style. So, this week none of the main characters feature (save for a brief scene right at the end) and instead we focus on Pinocchio – this seasons villainous hitman type – as he goes about his routine of killing people, drinking wine, being followed around by cute kids, discussing the gender of cars and plotting to blow up bridges.

It’s pure plotting and character, done with the kind of dialogue heavy, considered pacing I was worried Il Teatrino was going to skip altogether. It was compelling stuff, with the way Pinocchio himself is portrayed as a cold, emotionless tool of his superiors sure to lead to some interesting conflicts and comparisons with Triela, Henrietta et al when they inevitably meet.

This episode has certainly put me in a better mood about the whole season in general, though in truth I can’t tell if thats because the show is actually getting better, or because this episode just didn’t feature the main characters and their ugly, stupid, “cute” character designs. Only time will tell.

I also admit some slight confusion because, well… didn’t Angelica die last season?

… I must be missing something.

Gallery Fake – It’s the real thing

“My Lins have penetrated to my paunch. My rump’s a crupper, as a counterweight, and pointless the unseeing steps I go”


This episode, a flashback into our hero Fujita’s past where he works on painting a fresco for the ceiling of a prison, probably highlights everything that I love about this forgotten little gem called Gallery Fake.

It’s fascinating artistic detail mixed with a real human story. Here Fujita finds himself working as an assistant to an elderly prisoner – Shiomda Tappei, a former tatoo artist – who’s reason for being in jail is a mystery to Fujita. Tappei paints the fresco and Fujita, then a young and astonishingly feminine looking novice, does the back-breakingly painful assistant work.

While they work, we also get lots of random information about the creation of fresco’s thrown at us. For me, someone who’s in no way “in” to art but is always keen to learn new things, it was all rather fascinating. Suffice to say, however, any potential enjoyment you may derive from Gallery Fake can be ascertained fairly well from how interested you are in knowing that, in fresco’s, “the surface layer is made from a mixture of fine sand and hydrated lime in a ratio of one to one”.

Fascinating, no?

Ok, so I might have made it all sound fairly mundane, but through the twists and turns of the two characters relationship, their pasts and the nature of the fresco’s imagery, we get another of Gallery Fakes lovingly understated observations on the healing powers of art. It strikes a perfect emotional chord and, in a quiet and subtle way, reminds me why it is I love Gallery Fake, and am quite willing to wait months between episodes.

Because what is sad about Gallery Fake is how uncertain its future is as far as being subtitled is concerned. Currently the only releases come via MUJI, a Gallery Fake restoration project that, by the talk on the forum, seems to be run entirely by one guy. Sadly it seems likely that that one guy, King among men as he is, will no doubt give up without support from the community. This show is a fun, unique little curiosity in the world of anime, and it seems a shame that it’s not getting the attention it deserves when dozens of sub groups are literally tripping over eachother to subtitle emo school-girl bullshit like “True Tears”.

Ho hum.

Don’t let all my pseudo-pretentious gushing suggest I view Gallery Fake as some ill-treated classic, however. It is very cheap, with animation quality that hovers somewhere between ‘average’ and ‘totally awful’, and for every brilliant episode like this one, there’s a laughably naff one with a GIANT SNAKE in it. But its unique, often very intelligent and deserves your attention.

So come on anime community, show your support. let’s make it happen!