Thoughts – When Dreams Come True

And so I find myself back on my blog! My deepest and most sincere apologies to anyone who was following my weekly write-ups, which I unexpectedly ditched mid-season. The short story? Exams. Tedious, nerve-wrecking exams. Which, thank God, I passed! And passed well. Of course, following exams, the thought of having to catch up on anime seemed a lot less attractive than the thought of catching up on sleep…and one thing led to another, hence, the several months without updates. While I will not be going back to weekly write-ups on the shows I was following, I might still consider doing full reviews for them…so we’ll see.

Anyhow, even while I wasn’t able to write, I was still following anime news occasionally, and these few weeks have given me lots of reasons to believe that dreams really do come true! While I understand that not everyone will jump in joy at the following noteworthy announcements, it’s still nice to think that the impossible can become possible…which means, as cheesy as it sounds, that one should never give up hoping for good things to come.

1) D.Gray-Man Manga Continues

[SPOILERS for D.Gray-Man’s latest chapter]

D.Gray-Man has returned from the dead along with me! After an approximate hiatus of two years since Allen and the Millenium Earl were playing an angst-ridden game of hide-and-seek involving mysterious flashbacks, we now have the latest chapter of the dark and fascinating shounen adventure, which features, well… Allen and the Millenium Earl still playing an angst-ridden game of hide-and-seek involving mysterious flashbacks.

But who cares, this is D.Gray-Man, the shounen whose villains seemed less and less evil as the story continued; not to mention more and more visually appealing! The cunning, manipulative, Akuma-conjuring Millenium Earl is no longer a fat white rabbit in a top hat, but a sensitive, dashing gentleman with a deep affection for his long-lost brother. As tiring as it sounds, more prolonged mystery means more story, more story means more material to make an anime continuation, more anime means more animated Tyki Mikk. Two years on and I still don’t know which camp I should ally myself with.

That aside, it was still two years of hiatus with not-so-encouraging news in-between, and the one thing I’m genuinely, genuinely thankful for is that Hoshino-sensei seems to have recovered, and continues to share her story with her readers. If nothing else, you should check out D.Gray-Man for her beautiful artwork – it just keeps on getting better and better.

2) Kindaichi Gets a New Season

Yay, Kindaichi is coming back in October 2015! Yes, I know it’s coming back after a rather modest run in 2013, and yes I did give Returns a relatively scathing review, but hey, I like Kindaichi the way some people like their favourite K-Pop groups – unconditional on the actual merit of new material. New Kindaichi means new mysteries, and when Kindaichi is at its best, nothing else comes close. So 24 episodes is still worth it for even 3 episodes worth of a thumping good mystery – and yes I’ll be watching all 24 episodes just for those 3.

Considering that I hear of virtually no one else in the anime community recommending Kindaichi, with those who mention it daring to even say that Detective Conan is a superior franchise (and these folks shall go unnamed), Kindaichi’s new season is a nice surprise, and a good reminder that popularity doesn’t always determine the possibility of a comeback…although it sure does help, I suppose.

3) Legend of the Galactic Heroes Comes to the West

What more can I say, other than !!!!!! Never in a million years would I have thought this possible. It’s like Yang Wen-li decided to give up alcohol, or something. Gineiden is going to be available outside Japan in both anime (thank you Sentai) and novel form (thank you Viz), we might get an English dub, which means I might get to hear Reinhard lambasting the Empire’s aristocrats in a British accent…this is madness.

Also, while Gineiden is certainly not unpopular by any stretch of the imagination, it still is a very underrated show. And for good reason – it’s not the kind of show you’d expect to like; believe me, it wasn’t the kind of show I expected to like. But it’s always nice to give it more avenue for hype, because there are always hidden hipsters out there who will get curious about a decades-old production being every bit worth the licence.

So, to wrap it all up, there are good things to look forward to in the upcoming months. No matter how busy I can get, I always get perked up by nice surprises such as these. To everyone who is still waiting for their third seasons, or manga continuations, or licences – don’t give up hope! Now, if only Anno could get back to making Evangelion 4.0 so it won’t be a century until it comes to theatres…

Kindaichi Case Files Returns

What do Neon Genesis Evangelion, Berserk, Sailor Moon, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure have in common? You’d be absolutely right in saying that all of them had popular original series airing back before the 2000s, which has recently led to several modern-day anime reboots for each of them. In the case of Eva and Berserk, a lot of the premise for a reboot stems from the highly dissatisfactory original endings both had – or lack thereof, in the opinions of the disenchanted masses – and as for the other two titles, well…sometimes it’s just a worth a shot to test the tides and experiment with higher production quality to invigorate an aged but well-loved plot. Doing a reboot brings both a benefit and a detriment to its creators – on the one hand it’s a lot easier to draw in the crowd’s attention when there’s a pre-existing success to build on, and at the same time, expect the loyal fans to wave their pitchforks if the new series so much as changes the outfit of their beloved main character. And this brings us to Kindaichi Case Files Returns, the modern-day adaptation of the 1999 crime fiction series Kindaichi Case Files. Yet another franchise jumping onto the reboot bandwagon.

Before we dive headlong into what I thought of Returns, maybe it’s a good idea to point you to a previous post I did on the series, way back when only the first three episodes had aired. There’s an entire plot summary there as well; although to be frank, there’s nothing complicated about understanding Kindaichi; it’s pretty much another title in the category of detective fiction that includes Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and the very title I mentioned in the last post, Detective Conan. High school slob Hajime Kindaichi and his beautiful best friend Miyuki Nanase, find themselves consistently thrown into a variety of normal adventures gone awfully awry – a holiday in Hong Kong where Miyuki is kidnapped, a plane flight where the captain is murdered, a study trip where students lose their lives one by one… And it’s up to Kindaichi to shake off his sloth exterior and reveal the 180 point IQ he has lingering in his dormant brain cells, in order to expose the mastermind behind each crime, and to bring the truth to light.

Kindaichi is one of those series, which run foul of the standard questions that are so normally applicable to most other shows. When I say this, I mean that it’s a different beast altogether, and asking ‘Does it have a good plot that starts and ends well?’ hardly has any bearing on the overall effect the show is trying to achieve. Because when it comes to plot, and especially when it comes to Kindaichi’s plot, the only question that really needs to be asked is – are the mysteries good? Are the selected manga stories that made it onto TV screens smart enough, gripping enough, logical and believable to an unsuspecting audience? And the answer is…occasionally. Like I said in my previous post, the opening mystery is a downer that has so many plotholes in it, you could basically destroy it like bubblewrap; but the good thing is that after the Kowloon Case, the plots just redeem themselves by slowly getting better and better towards the end. Like with Bakemonogatari and its harem, I like to play the ‘best case’ game with Kindaichi, and my personal pick for the season is unequivocally the Inspector Kenmochi, The Murderer Case. It had literally everything you could ask for in a Kindaichi story and more – locked room murder, airtight alibis, a profile of equally suspicious-looking victims, discussion of deeper societal issues like criminal justice, bold reference to an actual tragedy in real-life Japan, a villain’s backstory so sad and compelling it made me bawl, and even an unexpected twist at the end.

It’s also irrelevant to discuss the growth of the main characters, because Kindaichi, Miyuki, Kenmochi and Akechi are more like nostalgic friends blasted out of the distant past; and it hardly matters that they never changed in the original series, and they still refuse to change now. Akechi, as always, is smug and suave, Miyuki is there to be a loving waifu to the gang, and Kindaichi is still the same perverted and prodigious hero he has always been, although in this adaptation he seems a lot more prone to moments of being chicken. As for Kenmochi, well, surprise, he does get some focus in the aforementioned Inspector Kenmochi, The Murderer Case – and somehow serves to be the representation of the strength of heart of their detective gang, who, having met more than their fair share of nasty pricks, do occasionally muse the morally reprehensible thought that an evil man deserves to die. There also exists an alternate form of character development – the development of the culprits and their victims. I once said that Kindaichi’s appeal lies in the humanisation of its villains, who never kill out of a pure addiction to bloodlust. Instead, they are often driven to insanity and murder by a tragic backstory that often intertwines with the pasts of their victims, who are hardly ever innocent by-passers, and are often shown to be the primary cause of their perpetrator’s suffering. As far as writing goes, characters always do have a believable and identifiable motivation to kill, although elements like good direction are missing in the earlier cases – and this meant that the emotions of the characters were not portrayed to the fullest possible extent. The one thing I really wish Returns could have, is the strong alter ego of the villains – a trademark of the original series that heightened the omnipotent presence and manipulation of every murderer. By donning a freaky costume and haunting everyone’s dreams as a legend come to life – be it Jason Voorhees, or Ghost Captain…it makes the ride just so much more thrilling, you know?

Personally, I think Kindaichi has one of the best soundtracks in anime – and it’s not because I have a personal bias towards this show. For its genre, no string and woodwind ensemble has ever come close to replicating the fear and suspense that comes with the impending killing sprees in every case. The music does so by playing the smartest trick in the book when it comes to horror – the very deliberate and careful use of volume; and especially the use of steady crescendos when the next frightful reveal is about to emerge.  I adore the music for the opening sequence of suspect profiles, the eerie recap of the current death count, right up to the climactic reveal of the murderer’s identity; if Kindaichi were more popular and well-known, I might even label Kaoru Wada’s music as iconic. It’s kind of like how you listen to Tank! and immediately say, “Oh, that’s Cowboy Bebop”, or how you listen to air guitar and think of Trigun…except that Kindaichi’s best music isn’t in its OPs, but rather the background music used during the sequences in each story. Good thing that Returns chose to keep the old soundtrack, and good thing that it went further and found better music for the OPs and EDs, because the second OP is amazing, and I never skip it. In short, the music for me was, and remains, excellent.

So why couldn’t Toei have done the same with art and animation, and kept the old style? I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with this, so bear with me as I sit here and whine. Take, for example, the OP sequence. With the bright colours and cheerful tones, who in their right minds would suspect that this was a show about tragedy and death? There’s a strange phenomenon in animation I like to dub the Aged Effect, which basically refers to my observation that old animation makes simple or juvenile things look serious and mature. If you look at something like Chibi Maruko Chan the kids’ show, for instance, I have this tendency to view it with more respect and reverence than many titles coming out today, and it’s mainly because the aged art gives it an unintentionally rustic and grown-up feel. And granted, what’s really ‘grown-up’ is the art in itself, but my subconscious manages to convince me that it’s of a more sophisticated quality because its age is so apparent. I’m not Hayao Miyazaki and I’m not expecting the studio to have used cell animation for Returns. But it seems strange that the agedness of the art in the original Kindaichi series gave such a natural edge to its suspenseful and macabre atmosphere, and having lost that natural edge in the advent of technology, Returns further pulls a Code Geass and uses the wrong palette for its settings. It’s almost as if the creators of Returns were trying to scrape a G rating, and completely forgot that corpses in this show were supposed to give heart attacks to the audience. I’m not even going to start on the inconsistent angles in the animation of faces, or the pinnacle of all sloppy animation that was episode 25. All in all, it’s crazy to be saying that modernised animation has partially dampened the show, but there it is.

As a huge fan of the original series, it’s subjectively impossible not to enter Returns with a minimal degree of expectations, and for the most part, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that there’s not very much that Returns does better than the original series. Most plots aren’t as clever as the best of what the original series had to offer, the animation is inconsistent with its supposed theme and tone, and general direction and choice of delivery for some scenes is less than stellar. It even tried to introduce a ‘boss villain’ concept in the form of Youichi Takato the Pupeteer from Hell, but his appearances were anything but ominous, and without prior knowledge of his story, it’s unfair to expect newcomers to the franchise to appreciate his sporadic popping up. Maybe the only merit of rebooting Kindaichi, is so that people like myself have a basis upon which to say, “Hey! New show this year called Kindaichi Case Files Returns! If you haven’t yet heard of it, now’s the time to start watching the original series!” A noble friend of mine once quipped that as a creator of art, the golden rule is never to make a sequel if it can’t be better than it’s original. Some people cite this piece of wisdom for stuff like Madoka Magica: Rebellion, or Eureka Seven: Astral Ocean, and the one I take the most umbrage at, Darker than Black: Gemini of the Meteor. Kindaichi Case Files Returns is another example of a show plagued with having to trudge in the shadow of a worthy predecessor, and for that reason, it’s hard for it to shine. Still, as a stand-alone work, it’s saved from the depths of dismissal (where I honestly hate to fling any show) because its best plots make up for some of its worst.

So maybe Kindaichi fits the bill of a show which was so good it shouldn’t have spawned a sequel, but you know what else rings true of this series? I like to say that when Kindaichi is at its best, nothing else comes close. For this reason, and owing to the absence of continuity in 25 episodes, here’s my ranking on the merit of the cases this show had. Those marked with an asterisk, are all that you need to watch to get the best out of this show.

*1. Inspector Kenmochi, The Murderer Case – Episodes 19 – 22

*2. The Campground “Ghost” Case – Episode 17 (funny as a stand-alone)

3.The Game Mansion Murder Case – Episodes 23-25

4. Murder at 10,000 Metres Case – Episodes 15 – 16

5. Prison Prep School Murder Case – Episodes 10 – 14

6. Evil Spirit of the Diving Pool Case – Episode 18

7. Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case – Episodes 1 – 4

8. Hayami Reika and the Uninvited Guest Case – Episode 5

9. The Alchemy Murder Case – Episodes 6 – 9

So if you’re intrigued by the average Detective Conan mystery and would rather see a grown youngster busting criminals, then look no further, Hajime Kindaichi swears in the name of his grandfather to do the job. 6/10, and let’s hope that all the mysteries on this show have thus been solved.