Another preview, this time the a 2-episode sneak peek at the new P.A. Works original Appare-Ranman!.  There was a time when PAW was one of my favorite studios, but apart from their Uchouten Kazoku adaptations they’ve done almost nothing on the TV side in the past half-decade that’s worked for me.  Still – their shows usually look good, and they have a non-traditional production model (mostly original works, very few manga and no LN adaptations) that should be encouraged for the sake of diversity.

The writer of this one is also the director, Hashimoto Masakazu.  As I’ve repeated till blue in the face the writer is the most important X-factor in any original anime, and as for Hashimoto his one prior original work in that role was the likeable if forgettable Tari Tari.  That was the breakthrough role for Hanae Natsuki, now probably anime’s #1 it-boy and the star of Appare-Ranman!.  He plays Appare Sorano, a Japanese with an Italian name for some reason, and a 19 year-old genius inventor.  We’re basically cooking with manzai here, and the tsukkomi to his boke is Isshiki Kosame (Yamashita Seiichirou), a similarly-aged swordsmanship instructor at the family dojo.

We know (and if we didn’t the prologue shows us) that the focus of this show is going to be a cross-country auto race from Los Angeles to New York sometime around the end of the 19th Century.  Anime gets even contemporary America so hilariously wrong that it should be interesting to see how PAW does with this setting, and in our brief introduction to it, it’s fittingly comic-book colorful and bizarre.  That label could be applied to Appare too – there’s no explanation for why he looks like he does apart from the fact that he’s eccentric as all get-out.

As you’d expect, the visuals are the star of the first episode.  PAW isn’t known for fluid animation but rather their expressive and fanciful backgrounds, and the art design here is pretty striking.  Appare’s lab full of gadgets is appropriately like something his hero Verne might have described, and he’s built an experimental steamboat which he plans to use to escape the clutches of the authorities he’s pissed off (he pisses off pretty much everybody) by disappearing for a while.  But Isshiki is an unplanned guest, engages the “emergency thruster” and leaves the pair stranded hundreds of kilometers at sea until a passing American steamer happens on and rescues them.  Cue, the premise.

There are a few more players added to the scorecard here, a mix of over-the-top cultural cliches.  We have Hototo (Aoi Yuuki) – who we actually meet briefly in the prologue – a tomahawk-carrying Native American boy (or possibly a girl) destined to be part of Team Appare.  Then there’s Xioleng Jin (Amamiya Sora), from a Chinese immigrant family that (of course) runs a laundry, working as a mechanic but dreaming of being a driver.  Finally there’s Dylan G. Ordene (Sakurai Takahiro), a six-gun totin’ action movie hunk who also happens to be the most successful racing driver at Holly Hills raceway.

Sometimes these anime stabs at Western cultural cliche can go so far past ridiculous that they loop back to a kind of zany accuracy, and it’s not impossible that could happen with Appare-Ranman!.  It’s a stylized attempt, anyway, like something you’d see at USJ, and that’s kind of interesting.  A potential problem is that Appare is incredibly annoying in a Sheldon Cooper sort of way – he’s completely oblivious to social niceties and relentlessly arrogant.  The rest of the cast is going to have to pick up a lot of slack, especially Isshiki.  He comes off pretty vanilla but there are hints he has a troubled past, and the notion of what he’s doing playing samurai at this point in history could potentially be an interesting one.

It’s definitely too early to make a call here, but there was enough in these two episodes to draw me in for the moment.  At least Appare-Ranman! doesn’t look like the overwhelming majority of an increasingly homogeneous anime landscape, and while it still has to actually be good, that is a significant point in its favor.  This is another one to check back on in a few weeks – though a good bit sooner than BNA, anyway…