Autumn is upon us, and amidst the changing colors of the leaves, the dropping temperatures, the shortened days and the holiday-themed advertisements it also brings with it another change: the start of a new season of television entertainment.

The mainstream offerings have all been undoubtedly reviewed and analyzed quite thoroughly by plenty of people across the internet, so I won’t bother retreading that ground. Anyway, the truth of the matter is that I don’t catch much TV these days. With the hours I keep, I pretty much have to watch anything I wish to see online, so I tend to stick to what I’m already familiar with.

While a nighttime work schedule and an increasing sense of disinterest towards the current trends in the output of most of the networks has kept me from seeing much of what’s on the air here in North America, thanks to the power of the internet I have had the opportunity to examine some of the new series that are airing elsewhere in the world. Specifically, in a certain country that has produced several of my favorite television series over the years, not to mention quite a few other highly original, highly intelligent or highly entertaining ones (and, in all fairness, plenty of mediocre or absolutely terrible ones… and it’s usually the lousy ones that are best known).

You can probably guess which one I mean.

Welcome to TheNarrator’s review of the Fall ’09 season of Japanese animation.

So, how are the anime offerings for this season overall? Honestly?

Disappointing.

I know I shouldn’t go into an anime expecting it to be the next Noir or Cowboy Bebop just like I shouldn’t expect a live-action series to be the next Farscape or Sarah Connor Chronicles, but that didn’t stop me from hoping that there would be something truly impressive in this batch of shows. Instead, they’re mostly mediocre and clichéd. Most of the truly excretable ones I was able to avoid entirely by making use of other people’s reviews of them, but a few still slipped through. And there were some that might have some potential but are flawed in the execution. Those could perhaps be called "okay": not painful to watch, but I could easily name better series that one could watch instead, so the only reason to watch these would be if you’ve already seen all those better shows and now you’re bored (like me). One show could be good or suck, it's too early to tell. There’s really only one show here that I can definitely call "good" and sadly, it’s not action or scifi or fantasy or anything cool like that… it’s a friggin’ romantic comedy. When the best thing airing is a romantic comedy, you know it's a weak season.

Of course, you often can’t truly tell a series’ worth from its first episode or even first several, so it’s entirely possible that a series that I’ve dismissed will wind up revealing hidden depths at some point further down the line. But these are the judgments I’ve made based on how things stand at the moment.

I also tried to include plenty of snark where snark was due, so hopefully these reviews will be entertaining even if the shows aren't. 

Overview

The Narrator’s-Living-Room Inn was doing a brisk business this weekend. First some old friends let me know at the last minute that they’d be visiting Seattle and crashed on my floor from Friday night through Monday morning. Then my friend who comes down from Bellingham for the weekly gaming decided to crash on my couch rather than try to go back on Monday night.

The old friends slept at night while I was working, went out and did the tourist thing in the mornings when I was sleeping, and then we hung out in the evenings. On Sunday, with my work week done, I decided to only catch a half-night's sleep to spend more of the day with them. As always when they come up, we had a few tasty beers at the Elysian Brewery. They insisted on going to the top of the Space Needle, though, and dragging me along Let me tell you a little something about Seattlites: we don’t go up the Space Needle. There’s a reason for that. It’s just not that interesting. You can look out over the whole city, yeah, but we already know what the city looks like. They were inexplicably fascinated by it, however, and stayed until it closed. It was after dark, and Seattle Center and Downtown are not great neighborhoods... I found myself longing for my body armor.

Monday night my friend from Bellingham and I stayed up until dawn (which is turning in early for a night-shift type like me) first watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for about nine episodes and then stopping and working on game-related stuff for a while, because there’s only so much Haruhi one can stand in a single sitting. Not the show, which is funny and smart, but Haruhi herself. She’s such a horrible fricking person! Like, a borderline-sociopathic sexual predator. It’s not as funny as the writers seem to think it is. They really need to tone it down. (They need to tone down the fan service, too, but I know that’s a vain hope.) Even with a little rum (previously established to help with the viewing of the first few episodes), we hit the limit of our tolerances after a while. One of the reasons the first episode of the second season that aired last week was so good was that there was so little Haruhi in it.

 
Got up early (for me) and then he and I went out into the U-District for a bit. It was fun. We checked out the comic and gaming store to see if they had some RPG stuff he was looking for. They didn't, but on the shelf I spotted Farscape comics! New Farscape comics! Why didn't anybody tell me they were doing more? I grabbed the two issues there and told the guy who runs the place to put the rest on my subscription list. I'm always interested in more Farscape.

Even better, my replacement Noir boxed set arrived. Discs themselves are exactly the same as the previous set, so I have all the extras, and I like the box art even more than the other one. Black suits this series, for obvious reasons, and the whole thing is more badass.
 

Anyway, the net result is that I didn’t really get a proper night’s day’s sleep all weekend. Decided to sleep late today yesterday rather than get up early enough to get my comics before the store closed. Will have to get them tomorrow today.

Also, it seems Television Without Pity has finally decided to close the TSCC forums. They shall be missed. Goodbye, Meet Market thread! You were the source of much fun and wasted free time over the last two years! (Did we ever decide on a fallback point, or are we just going to do our nerding on LJ full-time now?)

I've clearly been out of anime fandom for far too long, because a lot of great series have passed by without me knowing of them. I still wouldn't know about Seirei no Moribito ("Guardian of the Sacred Spirit") if I hadn't heard about it on the TWoP forums when Cartoon Network bought the rights to air it.

Seirei no Moribito takes place in a fantasy world that resembles feudal Japan the way most western fantasy settings resemble medieval Europe. Our protagonist is a woman named Balsa, a bodyguard for hire who fights with a spear. One day she saves a kid who fell off a bridge into the river, and finds that she's bought herself a world of trouble. The kid is a prince and his own father, the Emperor, has ordered his death because the kid is possessed by a spirit. All of which means that Balsa has to take the kid on the run with a squad on royal assassins on their heels, sneaking, planning and fighting her way out of certain death.

Seirei no Moribito is a really good series. Getting the shallow out of the way first, the animation in this series is great. It's by the same production company as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and has the same high visual quality. The action is good, albeit there isn't as much of it as one might expect. The fights are so fast and furious that even I had to work to keep up, and the choreography is solid. There aren't a lot of spear-wielding protagonists out there (swords get all the love), so Balsa's fantastic skills are a chance to see a fighting style not often seen on the screen.

Seirei no Moribito has a great plot as well, full of twists and mysteries for the characters to solve. I can't say too much without giving it all away, but the thing in the kid isn't what anybody thought it was, people's motives aren't what you'd think and the whole thing is much bigger than anyone expected. The characters are interesting and have complicated pasts. You wouldn't think that members of a team of assassins hunting down an eleven-year-old could be sympathetic characters, but they are. None of them want to have to kill the prince, but they're bound by duty and honor. It's entertaining to see how the assassins' respect for Balsa grows each time she thwarts them, and there's nothing "grudging" about it. They're impressed by her deviousness at planning ways to escape them, her skill and strength in beating them up and her dedication to saving someone she doesn't even know, even if it costs her her life. Balsa, meanwhile, is tough and pragmatic but also human and emotional, mixing harshness and caring as needed and unleashing a storm of righteous fury on anyone who threatens her charge. The prince grows as he learns to survive in a world completely different from that of the palace. And the expansive supporting cast ranges from the creepy to the funny.

With beautiful visuals, good action, and a good story, this is a series that anime fans shouldn't miss.