Hi I'm Dranzerstorm
You may remember me as a regular contestant on the caption battle contest.
Welcome to Retro Retrospective, my world dedicated to the old guard of the Otaku world; expect some reviews of the old & obscure, and in-depth geeky knowledge with the occasional top ten and I now have a logo.
Little info about me
Well I'm British and I'm in to all things animated and nostalgia.
I've grown up with every cartoon going and have watched hundreds of anime.
Oh and to answer a question I was asked once, no I don't wear glasses in real life, I would wear Loke's sunglasses though.
Now lets try something mainstream, mainly because it leads to something more significant, so today lets talk about The Croods.
The Croods is a prehistoric animated feature about a family of cavemen who live a very sheltered life until the eldest daughter Eep ventures out of the cave one day and discovers Guy, a young caveman with great ideas who introduces her to new things like fire. Eep's father Grug, being the overprotective parent, grounds her, only for the cave they've been living in to fall apart following an earthquake forcing them to look for a new cave in a strange new land opened to them by said quake. It's only after a few more incidents that Eep calls Guy to help them navigate these lands, which makes Grug all the more jealous when his ideas get ignored over the new things Guy keeps coming up with. Eventually Grug loses it and fights Guy only to discover why Guy acts the way he does and through a series of events, learns not to be overprotective and accepts the new life he's come to learn.
That's pretty much it story wise, very simple story, not much to challenge you mentally. The art design is creative as standard for Dreamworks; the comedy is okay for it's target audience but the story has been done before and better by other shows.
I mention target audience for comedy and that's where Croods falls down the most;
The British Film rating system uses U - Universal for everyone up to 18 - For adults only with PG (Parental Guidance), 12 & 15 ratings in between. Croods was rated U - Universal for everyone but most recent releases have carried the PG rating including Frozen and How to Train your Dragon. PG's are more marketable because it seems less childish to an adult who ultimately has to pay for the movie ticket and they are the ones who are going to be the critics not the children watching it; it also taps into the young gen X adult market who view animation as a major part of their social development and aiming too young chases them away in an instant.
Croods is entertaining to kids but only kids and fails to tap into a wider audience, something I expected better from the likes of Dreamworks.
It's worth one watch but after that you're not going to see it evolve.
Now lets dive into something different with a visual novel anime called We Without Wings.
We Without Wings or Oretachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai if you prefer, focuses on the lives of three male protagonists named Takashi, Shusuke & Hayato respectively.
Takashi is a shy student whose illness seems to send him to a fantasy world where he's a noble knight.
Shusuke is a part timer for the Alexander restaurant as well as a freelance book reviewer.
And finally Hayato is a so called fixer, who is part of a night time gang, although he doesn't exactly choose to be with them they just seem to turn up.
Each story seems to progress normally as Takashi tries to get by with a high functioning girlfriend as well as getting over his own shyness, Shusuke gets dragged into the struggles of an amateur writer of whom he wrote a review about, while Hayato gets reluctantly dragged into a gang warfare while locating a girl's bike. Despite the stories being very different to each other, they are somehow connected as all three characters seem to know a young girl who they seem to all live with.
The anime was originally a visual novel from the makers of Shuffle which tells us very quickly what kind of anime to expect but what it doesn't tell you is how well the story works; the individual stories worked on their own and could've continued working that way without the big twist mid series or the forced fan service which at times borders on uncomfortable.
I find that a shame, at the moment I'm at a crossroads with anime in general, as I believe 80% of anime have run out of ideas and popular shows are over hyped but the other 20% which includes this anime still keep me going and while it did end up throwing logic out the window, I still came away with a good experience which I can take to future shows.
Final Verdict: If you can stomach the poor attempts at fan service then you'll enjoy the story We Without Wings has to offer. The dub is normal and the art is incredible as is standard with a visual novel anime and you even get some decent comedy even if some of it is a bit random.
Okay, back to some really serious reviewing, no more distractions, except I want more hot apple Drambuie. No! Reviewing time and I shouldn't encourage drinking.
(Respect your country's drinking laws and drink responsibly)
Now for some Rugrats.
Rugrats was one of the starter titles for Nickelodeon's Nicktoons, a show told from the point of view of a group of infants if they were actually speaking and a secondary plot often featuring their parents. A typical episode would feature a problem that only a baby would understand or a situation where one of the parents does something and the babies get involved or the antagonist of the group Angelica trying to get her way, the show was a long runner for Nickelodeon until Spongebob began and even went beyond with a spinoff tween show.
Rugrats as a concept is nothing new, especially when you consider that the Muppets did the whole babies thing years earlier but the main fundamental difference is that the adults are not only shown but are often involved with an episode plot, and it's the adults that really sell the show to a higher audience when you consider the amount of hidden adult jokes within the series; this one below as an example.
I'll let the viewers work that one out.
The point is Rugrats sold so well to an adult audience, particularly those who are parents because they can understand every joke being said and have probably dealt with the situations on show, and with my generation becoming parents themselves, they now have a new appreciation for Rugrats as they now understand what their parents found so funny.
It's that special kind of generation link that makes Rugrats one of the best cartoons of all time and even if the content of the show is heavily dated, the situations and plots aren't.
So if you think today's Nickelodeon is a mess of mindless shows with no redeeming qualities and toilet jokes with it's only decent showing being Legend of Korra, then take a trip back in time and remember when Nicktoons actually did a good job.
It seems inevitable I would review this eventually given that it's come up a few times, so lets dive into Sailor Moon's only decent rival, Wedding Peach.
The Angel World is under attack by devils so it's up to the Goddess Aphrodite to call upon the Love Angels to stop them, this brings us to Momoko and her friends who get selected to perform this task whose families happen to be part of the Wedding business in Photography, Dress Making and Flowers respectively. This proves to be convenient as Momoko, Yuri & Hinagiku don their Wedding Gowns and become the Love Angels, although at full power they switch the Gowns for mini-skirts of power and the rest pretty much sells itself.
This anime is very cheesy but surprisingly successful during it's run and still stands as Sailor Moon's only decent rival, mainly because the show was a lot simpler and easier to digest as the cast stayed fairly small and the story was very easy to follow and while it took a lot of pages from the book of Moon, it still felt fresh and original, mainly because of how well the costumes were designed for the Angels; a lot of shojo works, especially Magical Girl shows are often defined by the costumes it's lead characters wear and having not just one but two iconic costumes instantly makes the show more marketable, a trick later picked up by future shows and even shows of today.
Sailor Moon will always be on top in the Magical Girl stable but how it's descendants follow is more defined by what the first rival does and a show like Wedding Peach has enough content to deliver but makes enough mistakes to know what doesn't work which proves more useful than what you can learn from Sailor Moon.
As for the dub.............................Yeah it's one of the worst dubs ever, don't even try and watch it, just stick to the Japanese.
Final Verdict: Ignore the dub and you should be fine, Wedding Peach does serve as a guilty pleasure but it's not as embarrassing as you might be thinking, give it a try you might be surprised.
Now we review a show with a bit of culture as we dive into Victorian Romance Emma.
The show is about title character Emma who works as a maid for a Governess who ends up falling in love with a member of the Gentry named William Jones, the son of a wealthy merchant family, however class lines are drawn and fate tries to drive the two lovers apart, will their love cross the borders of the social class?
Without sounding like a cheesy narrator, this show is an honest historical romance story that tells it as it is; it never gets too strange or surreal nor does it get really dramatic; writer Kaoru Mori, a self proclaimed Anglophile, went to great lengths to recreate 1895 London in it's purest form and insisted on not tainting it with anything from the realms of steampunk or the dark undergrounds of horror, it's just a love story and that's all you get, and that's okay if you enjoy that sort of thing; I went into this anime thinking about trying something different and coming out of it reminded me why I hate novels like Pride and Prejudice. It's pace is so slow that one episode feels as long as a movie and when you realize you got 23 more episodes it becomes a real chore to finish. There's nothing really wrong with the story and keeping the setting grounded into the realms of realism gives it a unique edge against other anime, backed up well by the beautiful art style and music
But there is one fault that isn't the fault of the anime itself but rather the Western distributors; it doesn't have an English dub and with it being set in London, it really needed it for immersion; the Japanese speech is distracting and doesn't work in this setting.
You see a dub works when the setting is a Western country like the States or Great Britain, it doesn't work when said show is spoken in Japanese because it's not only distracting but also discredits the work especially with the amount of effort that was put into making Emma purely Victorian Britain. It's the same in reverse as well, you can't dub into English an anime that relies on Japanese culture and mannerisms to tell it's story, a good example being Azumanga Daioh.
Final Verdict: I'd recommend Emma if you enjoy historical romance dramas and have read Jane Austen books. You'll lose some immersion with it being subbed only but if you're okay with that then it shouldn't distract you too much.
