Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin – 01

Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin was comfortably in the lower reaches of my expectations going into this season, pretty solidly in stab in the dark territory.  But I have to say, I liked the first episode quite a bit.  The production values from Lidenfilms are certainly low-rent, but the story is quite an interesting one and the cast is rather a good one too.  It’s a bit galling to see Irino Miyu in this knowing Mix is airing just a few hours away, but obsessing over that isn’t gonna help anybody.

The premise here is that creatures of fae – and just about every other mythical race and creature you like – are real and living in Tokyo.  It’s the job of the “Nighttime Regional Relations Department” to keep their existences from overlapping with humans too much and causing problems.  Newbie Miyako Arata (this is as likably restrained as I’ve heard Fukuyama Jun in ages) has just joined the office, and gets a crash course in his new reality from Seo (Irino), the science guy, and Kyouichi (the muscle, I guess).  Their beat is Shinjuku-cho, and not surprisingly Shinjuku Gyoen with its massive greenspaces is a hotbed of midnight activity for the “Anothers” – the collective name given to these fairy creatures both eastern and western.

I quite liked how all this played out – the attention to detail for starters, and also the way the exposition only gradually clued us in to how this department actually goes about their job.  It turns out that no one in the department can understand what the Anothers are saying, which obviously limits the sort of work they can do – except Miyako can, as he proves in mediating a dispute between Angels and Tengu that’s a sort of Romeo and Juliet sendup.  The twist here is that Miyako is apparently a reincarnation pf Abe no Seimei, who certainly turns up in many guises in manga and anime.

It’s quite an engaging setup, and I like all the characters well enough so far.  Plus, next week the series is going to my old neighborhood Kagurazaka (which is in Shinjuku Ward).  Color me unexpectedly intrigued.

Shoumetsu Toshi – 01

Another bottom feeder here, but the results were not so favorable.  Shoumetsu Toshi is based on a cellphone game, which is a pretty bad sign to start with.  But it’s Madhouse (even if that doesn’t quite mean what it did a few years ago), the director (Miya Shigeyuki) is both experienced and good, and the music comes from the legendary Kawai Kenji.  That was enough to get it into the preview, anyway.

This premiere wasn’t terrible, but it was pretty generic and lifeless.  Production looks cheap, Kawai’s music is hardly noticeable (I’d totally forgotten he was even involved by the halfway point) and we just get a whole lot of exposition dump without any effort made to make us care.  Post-apocalyptic OK, hundreds of thousands lost and never recovered, secret labs – pretty standard stuff.  But I felt nothing for Kana Hanazawa’s heroine at the center of it, and the hired courier played by Sugita Tomokazu is pretty plain yogurt too.  I might just give this one more episode but only if I’m having a slow day and the mood strikes me.

Fairy Gone – 01

The bloom is off the rose with P.A. Works, though that certainly makes me sad to say.  I like the idea that they focus on original series, but in practice the returns in recent years have been indifferent (most recently with the decent but ultimately uninspired Sirius the Jaeger).  They seem to be caught in a loop where when they do a signature PAW series like Iroduku it feels like they’re treading water, but when they try and branch out stylistically it usually doesn’t work.  There have also been some unsettling reports of “black company” working conditions there, but that’s probably a topic for a dedicated post.

Fairy Gone is a partnership of veteran action director Suzuki Kenichi and Grimgar writer Juumonji Ao.  Given that I’m not a fan of Grimgear I wasn’t expecting all that much, and that’s about what I got.  The first thing that jumped out at me was that this is the plainest-looking P.A. Works series I can remember – very generic character designs and backgrounds, and a lot of really laughable CGI.  At least with something like Iroduku you knew you’d get eye candy, but Fairy Gone doesn’t even offer much of that – the look of the show matches the writing.  Which is to say, kind of tired.

So apparently there was a big war, where humans let themselves be possessed by faeries and use them as weapons, and now they’re illegal.  And a girl named Veronica saved a girl named Marlya (Mariya?) when a bad man and his army torched their village, then joined the mafia to try and find her when she grew up.  And lots of bad rock music happens every time people run and fight.  If the goal was to make Sirius seem positively inspired well, mission accomplished – though that show had Andou Masahiro, so it’s not really a fair comparison.  But on its own terms Fairy Gone was a snoozer for me, sadly.