Top 10 Anime Soundtracks of 2014, Part 2

As the long-awaited follow-up to the first post, here are my top five favorite musical soundtracks of all the anime I saw in 2014.

5. Space Dandy

Composers: various

Space Dandy was a hard anime to place here, because it had such a huge team of people handling its music, to wildly varying results. The show was an anthology series in the truest sense, with the creative vision changing from piece to piece, and that included sonically. Some musical moments in Space Dandy are truly sublime, like those scored by the ever-reliable Yoko Kanno (who shows up again a little higher on this list), or any embracing the show’s love of all things funky. Others are…well, there was that weird “High School Musical” episode. Overall, though, I don’t remember many truly bad music choices in this series, and it always paid the close attention to musical placement that you’d expect from a Shinichiro Watanabe series. And it was fantastic enough times to earn its place on this list at number 5.

4. Tokyo Ghoul

Composer: Yutaka Yamada

Tokyo Ghoul’s composer seems like a newcomer to the anime-scoring biz, only 25 years old and with no other credits to his name in the ANN encyclopedia apart from this one and its sequel. What a debut it was! Tokyo Ghoul has a richly varied score, servicing the show’s many tones from the gentle slice-of-life scenes in the Anteiku café to, of course, its gory battles. It gets extra points from me for doing so much of the stuff I really, really love in horror scores: ominous chanting choirs (but not in the over-the-top way that Death Note ruined for all future anime), atonal piano and string flourishes, and punctuated low-string ostinatos. Consider how many different timbres, moods and harmonic progressions the above-linked track explores, and that’s just the battle music. Yamada’s score alone is enough to get me to watch his name on future shows, but the way the show uses the music adds even more to its greatness. The show knows just where to place each weird little cadence, and many of its best scenes wouldn’t be nearly as effective without his energetic music (up to and including Kaneki’s psychological torture sequence in episode 12).

3. Ping-Pong The Animation

Composer: kensuke ushio (various episodes of Space Dandy)

Ping-Pong itself left me a little cold, and I didn’t end up finishing it. But it was hard to deny how good its music was, and how well it fit with Yuasa’s unusual direction. Heck, most of the time I found I was watching more for the music than for anything else in the show. Sports anime can live and die by their soundtracks and how much they do or don’t match the energy of the action on-screen. That appears to result in more and more of them, from Free! to Haikyuu, embracing music that’s heavy on the electronic beats to match their high-intensity matches. Ping-Pong does this, too, for much of its soundtrack, but its much more ambient and minimalist than its brethren, with its tracks slowly building as gradual processes rather than rushing at you head-on. It’s like this even in its non-electronic tracks, like the one I linked above. I use the word “minimalist” to describe film scores a lot, but few go so far as to make you ask “are you sure Steve Reich didn’t write this?” Ping-Pong does, and in applying techniques like phasing to the click-clack of its plastic balls, it takes the trends of sports-anime scoring to their logical and transcendent extreme.

2. Terror in Resonance

Composer: Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop, Wolf’s Rain, Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex….need I really go on?)

It’s pretty much inevitable at this point that if Yoko Kanno composes the music to something, I’ll probably enjoy it on at least some level. Terror in Resonance was a muddled mess that I, nevertheless, still mostly enjoyed. It can’t just be excused as “not being what people wanted it to be about” like I saw its fans say; Terror in Resonance made it clear it wanted to say something about terrorism, and was way out of its depth in doing so. Yet, its smaller moments exploring the psychology of lost, abandoned children were powerfully resonant (hehe) in their grasp of the loneliness and ennui that comes from society leaving you behind. I don’t want to dismiss them because its larger aims failed.

Either way, though…those Watanabe production values! Especially the music!

Terror in Resonance is a little harder to categorize than most of Kanno’s scores. While she always traverses all over the stylistic map, there are certain trends that dominate one work or the other, from Cowboy Bebop’s jazziness to Wolf’s Rain’s orchestral heaviness. Terror in Resonance has its own distinct character for sure, but in a way that can’t be so easily summed up with a particular style. You’ll get the ballad linked above, in the style of Simon and Garfunkel or Pet-Sounds-era Beach Boys, or you’ll get gentle instrumental lullabies like this track. And then the steadily-creeping dread of this. And then…whatever this is. In general, it’s more atmospheric, less full of easily-hummable “tunes” than many of her other scores, but it sifts through a lot of different atmospheres. It shows the same great attention to detail, to episode, to moment that Kanno always does.

1. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders

Composer: Yuugo Kanno (Psycho-Pass, Birdy the Mighty Decode)

Hopefully this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, with how much I’ve gushed about how I adore the music for Stardust Crusaders on all my social media platforms. Maybe a surprise that I ranked it above a Yoko Kanno score. But now, you know…I really love the music in this show. Probably what I love about it is it’s just as weird, and wild, as the show itself. I talk about “variety” so much with music, but man, does Jojo’s score really show a lot of it, even though the series doesn’t vary much in tone from episode-to-episode. And it’s that variety that sells it so much for me. While none of the tracks alone are particularly bizarre or particularly “Jojo’s”—except for maybe the one I linked above—taken together, they’re a colorful rollercoaster of different instrumentations, moods and styles. It matches with the show’s own funhouse of Stands, environments and challenges as the characters make their way across Asia to confront Dio in Egypt. What’s more, the show has the bonus of bettering even the fantastic score and music direction of the 2012 series: not an easy feat!

Jojo’s is a music-obsessed series even in its silent manga form, so it deserves a killer soundtrack when transferred to film. From the unsettling dissonant strings of its tenser moments, to its characters’ distinctive leitmotifs, to the funky guitars of its sillier bits, Yuugo Kanno’s fun score more than delivers. It’s far from the most original music featured in anime, but it was the most entertaining and memorable for me. I was always aware of it when watching the show, but never in a way that pulled me out of the action on-screen. At the end of the day, there’s not much more I can ask for from an anime soundtrack, so I can’t help but give it no. 1.

Twelve Days of Anime #6: How Phantom Blood Made Me A Jojo’s Fan

2014 was the year I was introduced to the generation-spanning juggernaut that is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I started watching the Stardust Crusaders anime this spring, and enjoyed it enough to check out the 2012 anime series this past month. It’s a long, strange trip of a show unlike anything else out there, and fully deserving of its passionate cult following. But it wasn’t Stardust Crusaders that really made me a part of that following, that turned me into one of the Jojo’s obsessives who can’t shut up about it on Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong, Stardust Crusaders is an excellent show on just about every level; I put it on my top five for the year for a reason. It has great visuals, an awesome soundtrack, fun larger-than-life characters and is constantly topping itself in plot weirdness such that it’s impossible to look away. Yet, as much as I loved it, it wasn’t enough to suck me into the larger vortex of the Jojo’s franchise. I enjoyed its larger-than-life characters and ridiculous gags, but didn’t feel like I had a reason to care about the overarching story of the Joestar family and their dealings with Dio Brando. That only came this past month, when I started watching the 2012 anime that preceded it. Yep, Phantom Blood, derided by many as a boring slog and the weakest part of the Jojo’s anime so far, is what made me a Jojo’s fan.

It actually really puzzles me why people don’t like Phantom Blood. I get that Jonathan Joestar is pretty dull as Jojo’s protagonists go, although I personally found his selfless do-gooder personality endearing. But Jonathan is far from the only character, and the other ones—especially Speedwagon and especially Dio—are enough to carry a series on their own. Honestly, Jonathan’s simplicity and sincerity is a lot of why Phantom Blood works for me. It makes sense why he’s the kind of guy who would draw so many people into his orbit willing to help him—something his descendants have struggled with in Stardust Crusaders. It also adds a lot of humor to Dio’s intense grudge against him. It’s hard to understand why anyone would hate this guy, let alone hate him intensely enough to spend every waking moment trying to ruin his life.

Those two points distill the things that work so well for me with Phantom Blood compared to Stardust Crusaders. The first is the character relationships. The team in Part 3 hit off each other well, too, but that’s not fundamentally why they’re there. They just happen to have a common goal. Yet, so many characters join Jonathan’s fight against Dio simply because they’re enraptured by Jonathan. Of course I’m mainly talking about Speedwagon, a random London bum who is so overtaken by Jonathan’s forthright personality he instantly falls in love with him. (This isn’t debatable.) Will Zeppeli is so immediately impressed by Jonathan’s drive that he dedicates himself to teaching the boy a complicated art he’s spent his life perfecting. It’s these bonds that tie everyone together that make it so heartbreaking when these characters meet tragic fates as the series progresses. Even as little development as Erina gets in Phantom Blood, there’s enough that it destroys me when she watches her new husband die on their honeymoon. (Battle Tendency, of course, does a lot more with her character, and displays just how smart Jojo’s character writing is. How did the sweet girl turn into such a gruff old lady? Because, as one of my friends put it, life kept kicking her in the ass. Anyone would harden from that.)

The other thing that I love about Phantom Blood is the humor. Stardust Crusaders made me laugh out loud a whole bunch, too, but I knew when that was coming. All its jokes are completely intentional. With Part 1, sometimes you really can’t tell what is supposed to be funny and what is the show earnestly trying to make its silliness serious. I’m talking about moments like “my sword of LUCK and PLUCK,” or Dio bragging from his throne about how “this town is now mine” while surrounded by a menagerie of chimeras. Let’s not forget Speedwagon’s ridiculous expressions for every possible moment. How can you not love this face?

I’m committed to getting as much use out of this screencap as possible.

Phantom Blood–the 2012 series in general, really–also is extremely impressive on the visual front. I thought that Stardust Crusaders had some psychedelic color schemes, but the first part uses them to even greater effect, and more frequently. Not only does it just look way cool, but it highlights the characters’ psychological states to suddenly change their coloring and textures when we’re looking in their heads. Stardust Crusaders used this a little bit, but mostly only for battle scenes. It makes me feel like I’ve come to know Part 1’s characters a lot better. And…did I mention it looks cool? REALLY REALLY COOL.

Now I’m well on my way into Part 2: Battle Tendency, which so far, combines the strengths of Parts 1 and 3 into what is basically the perfect Jojo’s arc. (It doesn’t hurt that Joseph is one of the show’s best protagonists, either, far superior to either his grandfather or grandson.) Battle Tendency is a fun show all on its own, as it introduces a new crazy cast of Joestar allies to fill out its Indiana Jones-style adventure plot. Yet, it’s more resonant knowing the piece it plays in the larger Joestar family saga, knowledge that can only come about because of that story’s first part. Phantom Blood is the heart of the Jojo’s story, what started it all and what makes it so meaningful. I would think that to love Jojo’s is to love it. Or, at least, Speedwagon.

Twelve Days of Anime #5: Streaming Anime and “Power Hours”

In the spring season, the two far-and-away best series (by most viewers’ estimations, anyway) were Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders and the new season of Mushi-shi. The latter’s new season was vastly superior to even the excellent first, and a lot of people felt the same way about Jojo’s (as I make my way through the first two arcs, I’m not entirely sure I agree with this). Since just about everyone was watching and enjoying both of these shows and they aired on the same day (Friday), they gained their own nickname on Twitter: the “Jojoshi Power Hour.” A lot of it was a joke about what completely opposite shows they were (as I briefly detail here), and how jarring it was sometimes to watch them back-to-back. Yet, a surprising number of us started doing that, including me. Those Fridays in spring were some of the best hours I’ve had in anime-viewing this year.

“Power hours” as a concept, if I’m not mistaken, come from children’s programming blocs (or channels, like Toon Disney or Cartoon Network) that would air two episodes of the same show “back-to-back,” or ones of separate shows that were linked in some way. (At least, I remember those channels describing stuff that way when I was a toon-watching kid.) As an adult, where you’re voluntarily watching these series whenever you want, it’s a fun way to organize your viewing habits. A lot of us grown-up anime viewers also watch a lot of live-action American TV dramas, whose episodes are usually an hour rather than half-hour long. It can be a fun way to keep our attention spans stable across the two media. And when a bunch of people were doing this, it helped ensure you were watching along with everyone else—one of the best things about the proliferation of legal anime streaming. Anyway, 2014 gave us a lot of opportunities for “Power Hours.”

In the summer, there was the Fujoshi Power Hour on Wednesdays, with fangirl-bait Free! Eternal Summer and actual BL title Love Stage both airing that day. I loved both those shows and, with the exception of Free!’s weird (but excellent) streak of more psychological episodes in the middle, they usually hit the same tonal notes for me. So I could easily mix and match them, though Free! coming out a few hours earlier meant it was usually what I watched first. But not always. Sometimes, I just need to wake up my senses on Wednesdays with the clueless baby-gays.

No, not these two.

This season’s “power hour” is the ART Hour on Thursday, when we have Shirobako and Your Lie in April. Both deal with the struggles of young people trying to make it in artistic fields, with a mixture of comedy and drama. (The latter is considerably more dramatic than the former.) This is one I can’t really “break,” per se, because I have to review both shows for ANN. It still makes it kind of difficult to watch them back to back considering their overlapping subject matter, and how much both resonate with my life as a writer and musician. I kind of have to put a few hours’ distance between my viewings of each just to make sure my impressions don’t bleed into each other. I envy some of my friends who can watch them days apart, and not have to go through an existential crisis about their career every Thursday.

With this pair, I’ve been pretty strict about watching Shirobako first, since it airs first and therefore my “deadline” for it comes up first. I’m starting to wonder, though, if that’s really the best decision, especially since I usually turn these guys in with ample time to spare. Your Lie in April’s last few episodes have been very emotionally draining, and now it’s hard to look forward to doing more work with that show if I’ve just been perked up by Shirobako. (At least, that’s how it makes me feel most of the time. It’s pretty good at laying on the pathos when it wants to, but rarely with the devastation that Your Lie in April achieves. Shirobako hasn’t broached child abuse yet, after all.)

One of Shirobako’s more hurtful moments…

There were less “powerful” hours, too, this year. Saturdays in the summer, Aldnoah Zero and Captain Earth formed my “mecha” hour, and both ended up failures to various degrees. (Aldnoah Zero was at least like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. Captain Earth was just boring.) That was a slog, and if I got through it, it was just that the “hour” gave me the chance to burn it out of my system really quickly. The things I do for you, anime, and my desire to be a well-rounded anime watcher who’s seen both the good and the bad.

I’m interested to see if the next year will bring with it any oddly similar (or in the Jojoshi case, strikingly dissimilar) shows that happen to be airing the same day, that we can organize these ways. Bring on the winter season and its own power hours!

(P.S. In case you’re wondering why this is so behind, I had a lot of work to do yesterday that left me unable to blog on here. I’m planning to write two posts today to make up for this.)

Summer 2014 Anime: Part 2 – The Sophomore Class

So here is the long-belated follow-up to my post on the 2014 Summer Anime. Before getting to the original series, however, I’m going to take a look at some series that are continuing from the spring season. I didn’t plan to do a separate post on these, but I’ve noticed significant shifts in quality or tone in some of their second halves, so I figured they warranted their own post in examining how anime is doing this summer.

Of the series I watched this spring, three of them – Captain Earth; Haikyu!!; and the new Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure series, Stardust Crusaders – kept episodes up into the current season. I’ll discuss what I think has changed or stayed the same about each of them, along with the new Black Butler series, Book of Circus. Since I left it out of the “sequel series” posts, it’s included here – especially because I watched the original series recently enough for it to feel like a “continuation” to me anyway.

In rough reverse order of how much I’m enjoying each of them:

CAPTAIN EARTH: Up to Episode 19

At least it passes the Bechdel test?

Captain Earth is one heavily-anticipated series that sort of.. fell flat. It is and was never by any means bad, but it certainly didn’t live up to the high expectations for a Studio BONES coming-of-age mecha series written by Yoji Enokido, the brains behind RahXephon and FLCL. The first couple of episodes showed promise as each character was introduced, and then it went in circles with repetitive battles for its first half, making it hard for the viewers to care much about the conflict or the characters beyond the occasional slice-of-life moment among the four kids. And even those were ones we’d seen in plenty of other anime. Those first 12 episodes were quite the uphill battle, and I imagine most people dropped it if they weren’t invested enough in the creation team to hope it would improve.

Well, come summertime, Captain Earth is no longer a slog. The current arc, with the villains awakening more of their team in ordinary humans, resembles the “Rainbow Crystals” arc of the old Sailor Moon anime – contrasting these people’s (usually sad) ordinary lives with the dramatic personalities and goals they gain when awakened. They still don’t get the degree of development or sympathy that Sailor Moon pulled off with the Rainbow Crystal bearers, but they’re at least interesting enough to keep viewers tuning in. The trade-off, of course, is that protagonist Daichi has become a bystander in his own story as the focus has shifted elsewhere. Even Hana has become a more interesting character than he ever was as her backstory and reason for being were explored more in the last few episodes, and it’s hard to see why Daichi is the “main character” in the first place. The last couple of episodes at least seem to nod at exploring his psyche, and how it’s been affected by the enormous role he’s been given as the titular “Captain Earth”. But it’s just that: nods. Nothing substantial has happened. Akari, too, has only had tilts in the direction of her being more than a quirky hacker who sees herself as a magical girl, though those “tilts” still seem to hint at more than what Daichi’s been given lately.

At least with Captain Earth we can enjoy the high production values expected with a BONES effort. Not every series BONES has done is good, but it always looks good. It’s just hard to care much for that when the material is so lacking. Enokido has shown a real knack for character-writing and a depth of understanding of the adolescent mind in other series, like Ouran High School Host Club. Where is it this time?

HAIKYU!!: Up to Episode 19

Hinata, in an image.

Haikyu!!, on the other hand, is a show I didn’t go in with as high of expectations. I’m always a bit hesitant with sports anime; I’m terrible at sports myself and only been able to get into watching a few of them. Free! was the only one I watched before this, but it was more about the characters and their relationships with each other and the sport, than the actual competitions; plus, swimming happens to be the one sport I’m good at and where I’ve actually practiced.

Well, if Haikyu!! is any indication, “characters and their relationships with each other and the sport” is the rule for most sports anime. At least in the first half of it, which started with Hinata as a middle-schooler volleyballer who’s middling on talent, but high on spunk. Even when his team disbanded after losing in a tournament, he continued to practice spiking with anyone who would join him. The end of the episode then moves to his high school, where he finds out that the main player of the team that kicked them out of the competition is now his own teammate. The first string of episodes focuses on their initial antagonism developing into friendship, as well as the other characters on the team and their own relationships with volleyball.

The second season has slumped a bit, as it’s moved its focus to tournament matches. It’s done a little bit of the character-focus with other teams, and the Karasuno (main characters’ school) characters’ histories with each. For example, Karasuno’s victory over Dateko – whose defeat of them the previous year triggered enough anxiety in Karasuno’s ace Asahi to make him leave the sport – was a moral high point stretched out over several episodes. And one episode focused on all the teams who lost in the first round, including the one Karasuno defeated, and their own girls’ team. While those were interesting, overall it’s kind of hard to keep as closely-focused if you aren’t yourself fascinated with the sport of volleyball.

The first half of the series showed why sports anime is picking up speed with the success of Free! Even if you yourself are not an athlete, you can probably relate to the feeling of being a part of a team, and of practicing toward a larger goal. As someone who did a lot of band and orchestra in high school, I see a lot of my teenage experiences mirrored in sports stories – especially with the similarities between practicing an instrument and a sport. But when the focus is just matches and ball-hitting action, it will lose a few people who aren’t there just for that.

Well, at least the series continues to be eye-poppingly animated, and chockful of humor and heart. I know that that will keep me watching until the very end, even if I don’t find the curve of a particular serve all that engaging.

BLACK BUTLER: BOOK OF CIRCUS: Up to Episode 4

Sebastian Michaelis puts the rest of us crazy cat ladies to shame.

Black Butler started off its new series in traditional “recap” fashion – showing a typical episode of the original series to get viewers up to speed. Since it was my first experience with the franchise at all, I found it interesting, enough to get me to watch the original, but it was probably dull and unnecessary to those who are familiar with it and just want to jump into the circus-ing. Even the second episode, when the plot started in earnest, still featured reappearances of some favorite characters from previous arcs. (Not that I mind when they’re my favorite characters in the whole series.)

But now that that’s underway, this new series is starting to find its feet. The “Book of Circus” is many manga fans’ favorite arc, or so I’ve heard. Like most of the show, it involves creepy supernatural hijinks in the form of a crime for Ciel to solve: a traveling circus with a Pied-Piper-esque affect on local children. It’s good to see the series that’s infamous for “losing its way in order to please the shippers fanbase”, get back on track – returning to the heart of the series, the original manga that inspired it and that’s still running. If the anticipated “Book of Murder” specials are any indication, it looks like it will continue to adapt new manga arcs as long as there is more fan money to be spent. (And based on all the Black Butler cosplays and merch I saw this past weekend at Otakon, there will be for quite a while.)

The downside of having a built-in fanbase is the production team doesn’t feel the need to put as much effort into this latest installment. The animation took a noticeable step down from the first series, at least. But in a reverse of what I said about Captain Earth, this only matters so much if the material is strong. And so far, it’s easy to see why this arc is such a fan-favorite, from the unsettling mystery behind it all, to a colorful new cast of characters associated with the titular circus, to all the comedic potential of forcing privileged Ciel to live in a tent as a vagabond circus performer. There’s a lot to work with here, and the first three episodes of “plot” have shown a lot of potential.

Best, perhaps, is the sequence at the end of episode four, where the circus’s hypnotic effects on children is first revealed to the viewer – from the child’s perspective. The sequence depicting her fairy-tale hallucination and contrasting it with the actual action shows this team still has the potential for good visuals when they want to use it. Let’s hope they do.

JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE: STARDUST CRUSADERS: Up to Episode 19

Joseph Joestar: If you don’t love this character, you’re wrong.

I came into Stardust Crusaders a complete newbie to the franchise, not having read any of the manga or seen the 2012 anime adaptation of the previous two arcs (Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency). I was told it didn’t matter, that I’d still have plenty of fun with it. I doubted this pretty hard, but decided to give Jojo’s a chance anyway – and it turned out they were 100% right.

As something of an affectionate send-up of shonen battle anime, Stardust Crusaders is constant, breakneck action and fun from start-to-finish. It’s the one series from spring that hasn’t lost my interest at all – and in fact, even with the summer class added in, it’s the show I most look forward to watching every week. On top of the fact that I love travel stories (the early parts of Stardust Crusaders see the characters trekking across Asia on their way to face Dio in Egypt), each new location features even crazier enemies and Stands to battle. You can’t stop watching to see what bizarre new threat they’re going to face in the next country. It’s hard to see how a series could continually top itself in weirdness when one of its early episodes showed them fighting an orangutan on a mirage-boat – but Jojo’s can.

What’s more, it has a fun, colorful cast of characters – especially gruff protagonist Jotaro Kujo, flamboyant-but-dim Frenchman Jean-Pierre Polnareff, and grandpa adventurer Joseph Joestar. (As an American, Joseph gets the series’ most ridiculous lines, with exaggerated Engrish “OHHHHHH NOOOO!”s and “OHHHHH SHIIIIT!”s every time anything goes wrong. It’s enough to make one shriek with glee when they find out that he’ll be the focus of an enemy’s attacks in the next episode.) It’s hard to think of a single thing that isn’t engaging about this show, and indeed, I’m hard-pressed to think of any episode where it falls flat. It’s kept me on the edge of my seat through its entire run – again, even as a franchise virgin.

This excellence includes the production. While thick-lined character designs could be distracting in series like Attack on Titan, with Jojo’s it works, due to the art style in general emulating American comic books. It’s always bright and saturated, except when it shouldn’t be (as in a Pakistani town beset by a fog Stand), and a feast for the eyes. The music is also top-notch, varying from weird atonal piano and string slices in unsettling moments, to brassy, overwrought jazz for climactic battle scenes. Whatever it is, it always fits the scene perfectly and amplifies its mood, while also feeling like it couldn’t belong in any other anime. Everything about Jojo’s is special, and that’s what makes it an experience like no other.

Up next: The original summer 2014 series! Will include Aldnoah Zero, Blue Spring Ride, Love Stage!!, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun and Terror in Resonance!