Wooper: It’s just me on Mid-Season Check-In duty this month, I’m sorry to say. Lenlo has continued to watch all the shows he covered in the first of our fall posts, and I’m sure Amun is still over the moon about the new seasons of Natsume Yuujinchou and DanMachi, but you’ll just have to wait and see whether they can shoehorn those series into the AOTY conversation next year. My December round-up here won’t be our last post of 2024 – that’ll be the Winter Preview, which ought to pop up in about a week – but I hope you savor it all the same. Stay warm out there (or cool, as your hemispheric situation dictates)!
POKETOON S2
The first season of the Poketoon anthology premiered as a series of monthly YouTube uploads in 2021, and it had a couple of standout episodes, which I briefly wrote about for my “In Praise of Short Anime” column that year. Fall 2024 saw the return of the series, only this time it alternated between one minute shorts (which were cross-posted to other social media sites) and longer installments. It’s two of those nearly full-length episodes that I want to shout out here: “Childhood Friend Charcadet” and “Chansey Safari Tag,” the first and third videos in [this playlist]. The former is a tale of two wild Charcadet whose paths diverge after one of them leaves to accompany a trainer; it boasts stylish battle scenes and an effective, if predictable, tale of separation and reunion. The latter is probably the best of the lot, centering on an untameable Chansey whose attempts to help maintain its home Safari Zone are misunderstood by the park’s warden. Scenes of the Chansey fleeing trainers’ Poke Balls and emerging from tiny hiding spaces after using Minimize (a move whose aftereffects I’d never seen animated before) are tons of fun, and there’s a feel-good resolution to the story’s human-Pokemon conflict. This franchise has gotten a sharp-looking side project every year of the 2020s so far, a trend which these two episodes (plus the Primeape-themed one, if you’re feeling generous) managed to keep alive.
NegaPosi Angler – 8-11
As this is our final fall check-in before the holidays, I won’t have an opportunity to write about NegaPosi Angler’s finale, but I’m satisfied with what the show had to offer in these past four episodes. The pivotal one, number 10, brought Hiro’s fears about mortality back to the surface, then put him on a collision course with Takaaki, who we learned had cut contact with his family after experiencing the pain of his brother’s passing. As Hiro’s own prognosis is terminal, he reacted poorly to the news that his friend had failed to process a loved one’s death, and the animation in episode 10 really stepped up during their argument and Hiro’s subsequent room-wrecking outburst after Takaaki fled their apartment. The follow-up was thankfully a casual one, giving Hiro the chance to work on himself, his health, and his quest to catch a sea bass, rather than rushing the boys’ reconciliation (which ought to arrive in the last episode). Compared to these two installments, 8 and 9 feel somewhat small in retrospect, but both were worthy additions to the show’s menu, following manager Machida-san as he attempted to connect with his estranged son over fishing, then observing the good vibes in the EveryMart break room, even as the employees were trapped there during a typhoon. I was particularly impressed with the show’s dialogue-heavy script in the latter story, which went off without a hitch. Looking forward to the show’s conclusion next week!
Garden of Remembrance
Garden of Remembrance isn’t a fall, or even a 2024, production – it premiered two years ago at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival – but it did get subtitled just recently by the good folks over at [Orphan]. All they had to translate were the lyrics to a single song (plus a few cell phone notifications), since there’s no dialogue for the entirety of Garden’s 17 minute runtime. It offers few details about its characters, and its plot is feather light, but the visuals on offer here are incredible – as you might expect from a short film by Naoko Yamada. She’s known to use flower language across all of her works, and the central flower in this one, the anemone, can represent both the death of a loved one and the arrival of spring – the latter of which is represented by the gentle movement of the protagonist’s curtains after an intricately drawn exterior shot that descends on her home from above. The movie’s multiple phases begin slowly and with cooler tones, but once the death at the heart of the story becomes evident, the presentation explodes with riotous guitar-driven rock and beautiful primary colors, celebrating the love that the central duo shared rather than staying trapped in the limbo of the repetitive first phase. There’s meditative, joyous commentary here on grief, memory, and healing – made all the more potent by the film’s total reliance on music and animation. One of my favorite anime of the year.
Hyakushou Kizoku – 23-25
I’m a major admirer of the Silver Spoon anime adaptation, so the bits of Hyakushou Kizoku that revolve around Arakawa’s experience at her agricultural boarding school are my favorites. Episode 24 contained some such bits, including her inability to join the art club due to its nonexistence; instead, she joined the karate club and honed her drawing abilities with detailed animal diagrams for her schoolwork. Not being an artist myself, I’m always fascinated by their origin stories and practice habits – I remember an earlier episode where Arakawa spoke about her sketching of heffers’ distinguishing spots as part of her farm work, so this was a nice addition to that early detail. Elsewhere in these three episodes, we got a gripe session about the lack of a ‘one size fits all’ pest deterrent – as the techniques that repel racoons, foxes, deer, and bears are all wildly different – and a history lesson on the settlement of Obihiro (a city in Hokkaido), which was beset by frost damage, flooding, and three consecutive summers of locust swarms. The endurance of those 19th century pioneers far eclipses the efforts of modern, machine-assisted farmers, but I feel there’s a similar spirit at work in all those who choose to till the earth.
Ranma ½ (2024) – 9-11
I was ready to drop this show after finishing episode 9 and realizing that the martial arts ice skating plot, which had already begun in the previous episode, would extend into a third straight installment. More ridiculous special moves, more on-ice squabbling between tsundere teenagers, more of Mamoru Miyano’s hammy performance as the ladies’ man Mikado? Get me out of here, I thought. Still, I knew that Shampoo’s introduction had to be just around the corner, so I waited a week, booted up episode 10, and was rewarded with a scene of her busting through a wall in her first appearance, as if to mark the obliteration of everything that came before her. The ‘Kiss of Death’ concept that comes with her character is really smart, since it applies differently to Ranma’s two halves; for his female form, the kiss is deadly in the literal sense, but for his male form, it’s “deadly” in that Shampoo’s obsession means he won’t have a moment’s peace. I have to agree with a commenter from the previous check-in post about the strength of the remake’s animation, especially now that this lethal newcomer has to be drawn swinging her chuí around. We even got some choice cuts of Akane beating up a Ranma-clad training dummy in episode 11, before a clash with Shampoo left her with a classic case of anime-nesia. It’s a silly development, but I much prefer it to the show’s recent dips into martial arts tomfoolery, so we’ll see where it leads.
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