Panty & Stocking #5

I'm beginning to feel like this show is about 12 kinds of awesome. There's something about the bratty girls that's like a fix that keeps me coming back for more. You remember the Japanese invasion into American cartoons? This is the American invasion into Japanese cartoons. But it is oh so much more. It is one of the cleverest, most stylish satires I've seen in a long time. A worthy successor to FLCL: perhaps the most worthy successor from GAINAX since then.

The American invasion is evident in the obvious references to Powerpuff Girls. To make sure we get it they even showed a prominently featured Violet or Bubbles (I can't recall which) plushy toy in one scene. The format is American: completely episodic, with 2 separate (mostly) unrelated eps presented before and after the ad break. And of course the artwork style.

Then there is the infectious music. Edgy and hip, the music when the girls comes to the rescue always leaves you wanting more.

There is a bizarrely hilarious fascination with bodily fluid. So far we've had episodes about epic floods of shit, splooge, snot, and vomit, the last two being ep. 5, which for me has taken the show to a whole new level. (Blood and saliva are abundant in nearly all eps.) What happened in ep. 5 was that the scene shifted "slightly east" to the city of "New Tokyo". And what a dystopian New Tokyo it was. The artistic style reverts to completely Japanese, with a dreary realism akin to Ghost in the Shell. We see a day in the hellish life of an aging salary man in a dead-end job. When the pressure finally become too great it all comes out in an ocean of oh-so-appropriate vomit. When P & S show up to save the day, they look like pretty alien jewels on this blighted landscape: an literal "puff" of fresh air. The way the ep ends is bizarre and perfect.

We get occasional glimpses of P & S drawn in contemporary anime moe style, and they are hot, hot, hot. I loved a comment in one of the reviews at MAL. Apparently people were complaining about why aren't they drawn that way all the time? How much further could you miss the point? This show has no lesser mission than to rescue Japanese animation from the dead-end it has caught itself in.

Bakuman #4

I couldn't get myself to finish this ep. My eyes kept closing. I don't care enough about the nuts and bolts keep watching, and I have some other shows that I really look forward to, so status: dropped.