Fuji TV’s toying with late night anime was somewhat sporadic in the early part of the 00s. With titles like Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, Texhnolyze, Girls Bravo and Samurai Champloo, it felt as hotch-potch as TV Tokyo or TBS’ schedules, albeit in much smaller portions.
In spring 2005, that all changed.
A programming block called noitaminA began on April 14th 2005, opening with an adaptation of Chika Umino’s manga Honey & Clover. The aim was to create anime for an audience outside of the young men who most late night anime was being aimed at. As I noted in Part 2, NTV’s Nana adaptation took off around the same time (April 5th). While that was a success, they didn’t continue to mine the adult female audience in the same way that noitaminA did.
Some people make the mistake in thinking that in the mere act of not alienating women, noitaminA is aimed solely at them. Only five have been adapted from shojo or josei manga (though admittedly two have come back for sequels) and while one was originally intended to be adapted from a shojo manga (Genji Monogatari Sennenki), it ended up as something different.
The remaining shows have either been original material, shonen manga, seinen manga, novel or play adaptations. The real appeal is simply that the shows are being made for non-otaku adults. It’s telling that Honey & Clover, Hataraki Man, Hakaba Kitaro (as GeGeGe no Kitaro), Nodame Cantabile, Antique Bakery and Trapeze have had live action versions, this is material that naturally has a wider appeal than just the “typical” adult watcher of Japanese cartoons. Moyashimon is next to get a live-action show, in the noitaminA slot itself and apparently there are plans for a Paradise Kiss live action film.
I originally thought that the Moyashimon live action could have been a possible death knell. If it gets better ratings, surely it would be better to put live action in that slot more often? However, they’re extending the slot this month to run an hour and we’ll now get two shows in the slot at a time. So I was probably panicking over nothing.
Between NTV’s schedules and noitaminA the discerning, but lazy, adult anime viewer who dislikes the trends of late night anime elsewhere should find something to enjoy. Sci-fi fans might have to search elsewhere mind, as might people like me who want interesting animation above all else. Like NTV’s shows, while the material noitanimA delivers is usually strong, it’s not always guaranteed to match that in the visuals (though their hit rate is probably stronger than most anime slots).
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Honey & Clover – This is one of those shows, like Genshiken, where I got to an episode and thought “It can’t possibly get any better than this” and stopped watching. In this case I think it was the Twister episode, though it’s been an age since I watched it so I might be wrong. Anyway this is the show where Kenichi Kasai broke out from the pack in terms of being a director whose work was really recognisable, and well worth your time. It’s quite possible that anime would look very different without it.
Paradise Kiss – I believe I first encountered Osamu Kobayashi’s work with his End of the World short and the inclusion of Lolita No. 18 in the opening scene made me an insta-fan. Unlike many other people working in anime, with Kobayashi you have the sense that he has a frame of reference outside of other anime (see his Charles Schulz/Jean-Luc Godard mashup ED for Hanamaru Kindergarten). While this, like his work on BECK, is Kobayashi filtered through the visuals of the manga it’s adapting, it still feels identifiably his work. The sexuality, the ultra realistic backgrounds, and the trademark ED sketches, you aren’t likely to mistake it for somebody else. Even the choice of Franz Ferdinand‘s “Do You Want To” as the ending theme seems a particularly Kobayashi choice given the visual name drops they got in BECK.
Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales – I tried this at the time it was airing, but the first story didn’t do anything for me and so ended up missing the piece de resistance of this horror anthology – Bake Neko. Kenji Nakamura’s tale of a mysterious Medicine Seller made enough impact to warrant the spin-off series Mononoke.
Jyu-Oh-Sei – Shojo manga adaptation I know nothing about. It is dirt cheap on play.com at the moment though – worth getting? I’ve liked some Hiroshi Nishikiori shows, but I find he tends to be as good as his material.
Honey & Clover II – The rest of the manga finished off by the not as good as Kenichi Kasai director, Tatsuyuki Nagai.
Hataraki Man – Competent adaptation of Moyoko Anno’s publishing manga. There’s a tendency to over-praise shows that simply offer a different sort of narrative by dint of the material they are adapting. Hataraki Man is one of those shows. It lacks the visual flair of Honey & Clover or Paradise Kiss, instead favouring slick but forgettable interpretations of Anno’s art.
Nodame Cantabile – Hot off a TV dramatisation, Tomoko Ninomiya’s tale of classical musicians in love came to noitaminA. Honey & Clover’s Kenichi Kasai was in the director’s chair and brought as similar delicate touch to this material. The biggest hit of the noitaminA slot, it’s third and final season just ended this year.
Mononoke – Sequel to Ayakashi’s Bake Neko arc, I wrote about it here.
Moyashimon – Like Hataraki Man, this suffers a little from resting on the laurels of the premise of the manga it’s adapting. Of course, the premise is a doozy – an agriculture student can see and communicate with microorganisms. Add to that the strong design of microbes and it adds up to a successful show. The live action may actually work better by limiting the animation to the microbes. We shall see.
Hakaba Kitaro – The 6th TV adaptation of Shigeru Mizuki’s supernatural manga, this time using the original name rather than the GeGeGe no Kitaro name popularised by the previous five anime series. This is to reflect the darker nature of the show and how it adheres closer to the plot of the original book. As good as the show is, it’s overshadowed by the opening animation by the Mononoke crew.
Library War – Production IG adapted Hiro Arikawa’s light novel series about militias formed by library’s to battle government censorship. It’s a bit like Patlabor crossed with Fahrenheit 451. Despite loving the opening episode I got distracted by Soul Eater and Golgo 13, so never watched any more.
Antique Bakery – In fact so distracted was I, I never noticed this was a noitaminA show. And so I have nothing to declare but my own ill-observation.
Nodame Cantabile: Paris – More classical musicians in love action, but this time in France and directed by Chiaki Kon.
Genji Monogatari Sennenki – Osamu Dezaki does the Tale of Genji via the roundabout route mentioned earlier. Had very little interest in the anglophone fan scene, I caught the first episode, but the wait for more meant my interest had dwindled by the time more were available.
Eden of the East – Another show that I’ve only caught the first episode of and want to see more. Arguably the noitaminA show with the highest expectations on its shoulders. It was original material (at this point Bake Neko/Mononoke was the only other show fitting this bill), had character design by Honey & Clover author Umino Chika, was developed by Production IG and created by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost In The Shell SAC, Guardian of the Sacred Spirit). Furthermore it was developed with spin-off feature films (designed to conclude the story) in mind. It’s an interesting approach, and while it didn’t set the box office on fire, I wonder if low level theatrical releases of material that is essentially OAV episodes of a TV series are more economically worthwhile than a straight to DVD/BD release.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 – Talking of original material, here we have BONES joining the fray with this disaster TV series. While I can see why people like it, for me it sits in the realm of animated series that are only animated because the live action budget would be prohibitive. Plus it suffers from writing that doesn’t seem to take into account what makes effective animation. Crowd scenes for instance are easy to write, notably harder to animate effectively.
Trapeze – Mononoke‘s Kenji Nakamura returns with what is easily the most experimental of all the noitaminA shows. Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game is probably the closest visually in terms of the mixed media collage that Nakamura uses here. It’s not as effective as Mind Game, nor as polished as Mononoke, but the ambition just about pays off in the finished show. The quirky psychiatric drama of Hideo Okuda’s novels is delivered in an episodic format, but they act as individual layers of a larger whole as it dawns on the viewer that all the episodes happen over the same period of time and the stories overlap and intrude on one another.