I’m a pretty tough anime customer. I like it best when a show gets me to think a bit (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), or shows me something I’ve never seen before (Mushi-shi). But every now and then, like anyone else, I just wanna see stuff get shredded and blowed up really good. Tokyo Majin does such a great job of delivering in that department, right in the first episode, that I was terrified the rest of the disc wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as good. How could they possibly keep up this level of manic energy?

Sometimes it’s just so nice to be proven wrong.

Article originally written for AMN.

I’ll start with the easy praise first: Venus Versus Virus is one of the best titles I’ve ever heard for an anime. VVV (see? it even abbreviates nicely!) is of course the animated adaptation of the manga series currently being offered in English courtesy of Seven Seas, which my colleague Adam Beck recently peeked at. I haven’t read the manga itself, but from what I can tell the show follows it fairly closely. It’s a catchy, frothy, Goth-y action confection with a lot more action and a few more twists than I thought it would have. The cuteness of the surface material conceals a much darker story, which I hope we get to see more of as time goes by.

VVV kicks off with a premise most people reading this should be able to recite with their eyes closed: A young person has their humdrum ordinary life turned upside down when they discover they’re in possession of a terrible power. Here the person in question is Sumire, a girl attending a private academy; she’s got the usual collection of female friends and at least one terminally shy male admirer. After class, she hustles on over to the “Venus Vanguard” antique shop nestled under the elevated railway tracks, where she helps out the Gothic-Lolita-wearing, eyepatch-laden (and emotionally clamped-down) Lucia.

Article originally written for AMN.

Article originally written for AMN.

Article originally written for AMN.

How tempting it is to tell people to skip my review of Mushi-shi Vol. 4 and just urge them to go buy it. If you want to see the most thoughtful and beautiful anime out on the market right now, this is it. You won’t see things crashing into each other or a hero wielding a weapon of incredible strength, because that’s not what this series is about. You will, however, see more real wonder and mystery than you’ll find in any ten other shows.

I mentioned that in Volume 3 we saw a number of things that clued us in a little more as to the nature of Ginko’s own history, and how he came to be a mushi-master. Volume 4 expands the scope of the story, too, but in a slightly different direction: instead of seeing the mushi as a problem to be solved, there’s more of a sense that sometimes there is no “solution.” Sometimes the problem is one of human expectations and need; sometimes the mushi are just catalysts for calamities that cannot be undone but simply have to be accepted as they are. In fact, the only really “conventional” episode for this volume is the first one, where a girl worries about the possible consequences when her brother manifests the ability to see mushi — mushi that can disrupt the very flow of the seasons.

Article originally written for AMN.

Article originally written for AMN.

Article originally written for AMN.