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This Week in Anime
The Great Anime Holiday Gift Exchange (Part Two)

by Lucas DeRuyter & Steve Jones,

It's Lucas and Steve's turn to unwrap their presents! Will what they find be trash, treasure, or an exciting combination of the two?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

The Revolutionary Girl Utena TV series is streaming on YouTube, while the movie is available on RetroCrush. Trigun and Claymore are available on Crunchyroll. Gushing Over Magical Girls is available on HIDIVE. The Higurashi: When They Cry anime and The Big O are not streaming and are also out of print. The Higurashi: When They Cry visual novels are available on Steam.

@RiderStrike @BWProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Steve
Ho ho ho, Lucas! Christmas is just around the corner, and since this is your first Yuletide season as part of the TWIA crew, allow me to formally introduce you to our annual holiday tradition: gifting each other big suitcases stuffed with money.

Alternatively, I suppose we can also make do with a few anime recommendations each. I'll leave the decision to you.
Lucas
Wait, the suitcases were supposed to be stuffed with cash!?? I filled mine with those weird, pre-loaded debit cards that people only buy when trying to launder money or give a quick holiday/birthday gift to a teen who isn't quite old enough to have a debit card. Uhhhhhh...

Yeah! Let's do anime recommendations instead! (Searches for how to return a gift card) Do you want to start with Big O? Or is it The Big O? Both my memory and research are returning mixed results.
That works for me! I had to watch The Big O anyway to make that opening bit, so it's convenient, if nothing else. Before we get on with the show, I just want to make sure everyone has already read Coop and Chris' gift exchange in Part 1, both for context and for good anime chatting. In short, we paired off, took a gander at each other's backlogs, and chose three shows for the other person to do the three-episode litmus test. It's not exactly "secret," but it sure is Santa!

Anyway, you gave me The Big O to watch, and I hope it comes as no surprise that I dug the hell out of it. This is the coolest-looking cartoon I've watched in a long time.

Hell yeah! Thank you, Coop and Chris, for spreading some holiday cheer and the good word on anime like The First Slam Dunk, Odd Taxi, and a bunch of others I'm not cultured enough to speak on.

That's great to hear since that's about all I know about The Big O, haha. I was just a little too young to check it out on Toonami when it first aired, but even as a kid, I thought it looked rad as hell.

But what's the deal with The Big O, and what did you think of it? Is this some pulp noir Gundam or an even more unique entry in the mecha genre?

Hmm, I wouldn't use Gundam as a reference point, but it is absolutely, hilariously noir. Roger is definitely a sendup of the weary detective protagonist, based on his consistent inner monologuing, penchant for femme fatales, and entirely black wardrobe. But the show knows to be just the right amount of goofy about it.

Content-wise and tonally, though, it most resembles older, sillier robot anime and comic book serials. There is probably some tokusatsu in there, too.
Oooh! That's good to hear! I was going to say this anime calls to mind Batman: The Animated Series, and I'm glad that's not just a reductive comparison. Can it still hang with some of the other Toonami greats?
The Batman comparison is the main thing I remember from those old Toonami adverts, and it's hilarious how much of that holds true. Like, Roger is Bruce Wayne. He drives a Batmobile. He has a butler. He wears double-breasted suits. He just happens to also pilot a giant robot, and I have to say, he wins one over on Batman in that regard.


But, I really can't stress enough how much this anime rules to watch. It oozes so much style and confidence and doesn't look like anything else. I didn't know this until I watched it, but I very badly needed to see giant mechs fighting in an art deco city. It tickles something in my brain.

Also, I love Dorothy.
Damn, take that Batman Ninja! The Big O did Batman in anime better nearly 20 years before DC's first foray into isekai. Also, I think Batman has a robot suit sometimes? But he mostly just uses it to fight Bane.

Also, that's great to hear! Glad I didn't give you a lemon for one of your backlog gifts!
Not in the slightest! There's so much going on in the first three episodes of The Big O that I could honestly fill up this entire column talking about everything it does well. But that would be rather selfish of me, and this is a season of giving; I'd much rather hear about one of your gifts! And since nothing says Christmas quite like pastoral horror and paranoia, why don't you tell me about Higurashi?
Oh my god, Steve. Higurashi was EXACTLY the kind of Christmas counter-programming that I needed!

Out of the gate, it opens with abject brutality and a character who is very clearly losing his goddamn mind; and then swerves into some of the most cliche anime plot points, characterizations, and voice action choices imaginable! The tonal whiplash left me both intrigued and desperate to learn more!
I distinctly remember my first experience with Higurashi in my college anime club. I think it was one of the first shows we watched my freshman year, and I had no context or preparation for anything it delivered. You could say it caught me like a baseball bat to the head.
Honestly? The only way the anime could have had a bigger impact on me is if they kept the original art style from Ryukishi07's When They Cry visual novel, which this series is adapted from.
I love those sprites so much...
LMAO, I saw someone describe them as "hyper-deformed murder puppets" while researching the series, and that's the best summation of any art style that I've ever heard!

Higurashi is also old enough now that the tropes it deliberately subverts for its murder-mystery plot are oddly comforting in their own right. It was surprisingly nostalgic to see characters wear wildly impractical "only in anime" outfits in a slice-of-life setting and the acting choices in the dub that you don't really hear in modern anime voice acting anymore.

And then the show brutally RIPS those comforts away for some shockingly grounded dark shit! That's when I knew Higurashi had my number and that I was going to spend a chunk of the winter break binging through it.

Nice! It's an incredible series, and while I can't speak for all of its anime (the original season that you watched there is the furthest I ever got), I will vouch hard for the visual novels. You might think you know where they're going, but they bloom into a much richer and gnarlier story than anything I expected. They're a commitment, but they're worth it.—only if you use the original sprites, of course.
Oooooh~ I do like myself a good metatextual visual novel!

Speaking of games, the best compliment I can give to Higurashi is that it's made me even more excited about Ryukishi07's upcoming Silent Hill f! I'm also a newcomer to that franchise, but I'm so excited for what he has in store for us!
The man's mind is huge, so I'm eager to see what he does there. Also, I gotta say, seeing those screencaps is making me so nostalgic for that washed-out mid-2000s Studio DEEN look.
I know I'm generalizing, but I really did think to myself, "Man, they don't make 'em like this anymore," a few times while watching Higurashi! Haha.

Though, speaking of stuff they explicitly did not (re)make like that, what did you think of OG Trigun!??
Before our readers release the hounds, I want to say, yes, I had seen an episode of Trigun before this column. I was an avid watcher of [Adult Swim]. But it was only one or two episodes twenty years ago, so I think the show was fair game for my backlog.

And I'm glad you chose it, because I had a great time here, too! It was interesting, going backward from my experience with Blood Blockade Battlefront to this because you can instantly tell it's by the same guy. Nightow's brand of writing, humor, and character design is incredibly distinct, giving Trigun a ton of personality up front.
Oh, absolutely! I'm on the record saying that I think the new Trigun anime is an interesting refresh of this story and these character designs, but it does feel like there's something a little more foundational to the look of the original Trigun.

Like, the new Trigun feels like it's very much informed by how culture and what's "cool" has progressed in the last twenty years, whereas the original Trigun feels like it's setting the tone for what's cool and fun in anime for the twenty years after its release.

However, it probably helps that anime was much less available when the original Trigun came to the U.S., so the influences Nightow drew from would be much less apparent to American audiences at the time, haha.

True! What I might have loved most about these first three episodes is how unique each looked. You can easily tell at a glance that each one had a different animation director, leading to a wide variety of Vashes, enhancing his inherent cartoonishness. As much as I love Studio Orange, that's one area where 3DCG animation can't facilitate the same kind of personal touch across different animators.


I also appreciate the canyon of a gulf between the cool, badass Vash in the OP and the goofy little worm the actual show delivers.
Aw, that is a ton of fun! One of my favorite anime, Yu-Yu Hakusho, has a similar feel where you can tell that different people were in charge of different batches of episodes. Not to go full Oldtaku, but I think the more recent emphasis on characters always being "on model" has robbed us of these little, more human, touches in animation.
Not to go on a tangent, but having just finished YYH myself: yes, agreed, absolutely. And I miss when shows had an episode count that allowed for self-contained stories that didn't necessarily have to advance the plot. I don't think there's a single overarching narrative thread woven between the first three episodes of Trigun besides Meryl and Milly inadvertently running into Vash without knowing he's Vash. But the vibe of the anime is constructed masterfully, wearing its influences while maintaining its own identity.


Also, I love Milly. Tall women in suspenders, hell yeah.
I couldn't agree more! I've long held the opinion that "filler" episodes in any form of media are entertaining and maybe even beneficial to the work, so long as the characters are well-written enough to be enjoyable outside of an overarching plot. And also, yes. Milly's exclusion from Trigun Stampede is the biggest mark against it.
It seems unwise to ignore a woman who can swing around a Gatling gun like it's a wiffle bat, but what do I know? I'm not on any anime production committees.

Speaking of powerful women, though, I believe I also recommended an anime with a female protagonist who sports a slightly pointier weapon. So, tell me how revolutionary you found Utena.
Oh boy, Steve. I'm about to do something probably unwise in expressing this opinion, but I struggled to watch through the first three episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena!

Don't get me wrong! Even if I bounced off of this anime, I can still recognize that it's a classic for good reason and has overtly gone on to inspire more modern hits like Kill la Kill and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, but the slower pacing and wealth of reused animation wore me down more than I expected.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how wrong it is. Seriously, though, that's understandable! Utena is a notoriously prickly work that doesn't lead with its strongest material. Granted, there's a reason it starts the way it does, with that rigid and recycled structure, but that reason only unfolds as (or if) you watch further along. And I know all too well that "trust me, it gets better" isn't the most reassuring sell on an anime.
Haha, especially when, as this exercise demonstrates, there's a lot of good anime for folks to catch up on!

In truth, I'm bummed that I bounced off of Utena. I'm a queer, nearly 30-year-old who's made anime a shockingly large part of their life and career. By all accounts, Utena should be my jam!

However, I want to tell our readers not to just take my reaction to heart. The good folks at Nozomi Entertainment have put all of Utena up on their YouTube channel for free, and I still highly encourage anyone who cares about anime as a medium and the development of this art form to check it out.

I'm also going to give you in particular an unusual recommendation and nudge you toward the movie, Adolescence of Utena. Many Utena fans will tell you not to do this since the film is a pseudo-sequel/retelling of the show, and lots of it won't make sense without the context provided by the TV series. However, I started Utena with the movie, and it pretty immediately became my favorite anime of all time. It still is! The movie condenses a lot of the TV series' themes, symbols, and aesthetics into a smaller, punchier package, so I think it can genuinely work as an intro and teaser for the whole story if you're interested.


Timing might also be a factor, though. I found the movie by chance when I was about 16 or 17, and it blew my teenage mind wide open.
Hey, I started bandwagoning JoJo's Bizarre Adventure with part 4! I'm down to get into a series midway through so long as the vibes are on point and it has something meaningful to say! Thank you for the Adolescence of Utena rec, and I'm throwing it on my backlog now!

Speaking of blowing minds, I've heard that Claymore is supposed to be similarly impactful! Did it live up to the hype for you?
Now I'm gonna take a page out of the book of disappointment and say, nope! Not really! I thought I'd like Claymore a lot—I mean, it has the sword-fighting women angle to go alongside Utena—but I found these first three episodes middling overall.
Oh no!!! Is dark fantasy as a genre just cursed? Between Claymore, Berserk 2016, and the Bastard!! anime I've heard nobody talk about, it seems like the gritty manga that helped that medium find a foothold in the U.S. is destined to bomb when they're adapted into anime.
I actually think the main problem on my end was that I had already read Berserk, and I just couldn't help comparing everything Claymore did against what Miura did, only he did them first and did them much better. Guts is an immediately more compelling character than Clare. The child companions in Berserk are more interesting than the milquetoast kid in this. Miura's monster designs wipe the floor with these dollar-store ghouls. So on and so forth.


It's possible Claymore is a slower burn, and it lays some breadcrumbs for more interesting story developments down the line—I like the dual human/monster nature of the Claymores—but I can't say I felt too optimistic about their follow-through.
Oof, that might be the most damning evaluation I've ever heard you give an anime, Steve! Though I completely understand where you're coming from. As I've mentioned time and time again in This Week in Anime's quarterly isekai roundup, it's no fun watching something where most of its ideas have been done better elsewhere, and the remaining new elements aren't enough to make it seem worthwhile.
It also didn't help that this was the worst-looking anime of the three. I know I just pined for the muted palettes of mid-2000s anime, but this is simply too grey, even for my tastes.

Oh man, that's not a muted color pallet; it's just poorly-lit anime. That's as dark as most major motion pictures produced in the U.S. nowadays!
Let's not say things we can't take back, lol. To be clear, I didn't dislike Claymore. It's not a lump of coal. I might even revisit it when I'm feeling thirstier for some dark fantasy with big swords and minimal brainpower required. But The Big O and Trigun set a much higher bar that this had no chance of clearing.
That's fair. And when you're watching through three anime in your backlog in one go, something's bound to shine less brightly than the others.
They can't all pack as big a wallop as Megadeus.

That said, I had one last whopper of a gift for you, and I'm dying to find out what you thought of it.
sigh As we alluded to at the top of this chat, I've now watched Gushing Over Magical Girls, and I'm officially Gushing-pilled.
Look at you, getting to watch two whole anime starring an Utena. You must have felt so lucky.
I do feel lucky! Rare is it that I get to experience a piece of media that's such an honest, joyous, and uncompromised exploration of someone discovering their sexuality. I really have to hand it to Gushing Over Magical Girls for using the well-established iconography of magical girls to explore the challenges of having a sexuality outside of puritanical norms, but also the community you can find by bonding over shared kinks.

That being said, BOY, do I wish that the characters in Gushing were explicitly adults instead of being vaguely school-aged. It'd also be great if Utena had a bit more agency at the start of the show too, instead of functionally being in a blackmail hentai in the first episode! Ngl, I'm a little morally conflicted with this one, haha.
That's fair! It's not an easy show to recommend (unless you're doing it as part of a gimmick for a weekly column on an anime news website), but I think its degeneracy is, by and large, a force for good. I did not expect it to turn out this way when I started the series, but it quickly became one of my favorite anime of the year. No asterisks, equivocations, or hemming and hawing about it. Gushing Over Magical Girls is genuine, earnest, and good. A paragon of filth.
Even the fact that we're talking about Gushing in this column speaks to its quality. It's easy to imagine other anime trying to tackle this subject matter and failing spectacularly. Instead, Gushing feels like kinky people made it for kinky people, and, as one of those, I really dig it and can't wait to finish it.

Oh! I should probably also mention that, on top of being really kinky, Gushing Over Magical Girls is also really gay! This one's up on HIDIVE in all its raw, unedited glory if this chat awakened anything in anybody!
When it comes to loving girls, Utena is most certainly a worthy successor to her namesake. I'd also add that it has one of the year's best translations. It's fun and crass in a way that perfectly suits the tone of the show.

Plus, there are so many weird girls you have yet to meet. I'm glad you liked it, and I hope you continue with it!
Oh my god, thank you for bringing up the stellar translation choices! You're right, top to bottom, everyone on this project understood the assignment and absolutely nailed it, and I'm sure I'm Gushing will give me plenty to gush about as it goes on!
And really, when you think about it, isn't that what these holidays are all about? We get so lost in the throes of traveling, materialism, capitalism, and religion that we forget the most important thing: anime lesbians.
Is Gushing Over Magical Girls secretly the greatest Christmas anime of all time? Get in the comments and figure it out, gang! And while you're there, I hope y'all have a great holiday season!
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