Two years ago I was sitting at home on a boring summer afternoon, lacking the desire and motivation to walk outside in the sweltering June heat, when one of the creatures at my local IRC haunt suggested I watch Read or Die. I was either overtired, or suffering from heatstroke, or doped up on happy pills, or something... because I couldn't think of a good reason to turn him down. Before I knew it I was doing something I had never done before in my life: I was watching an anime fansub on my computer-box. And I was enjoying it.
And thus Anime Anonymous was born. Since then, I've watched an enormous amount of anime. Much of it I've reviewed on this site. Some stuff I went back to dredge up from years gone by for a second look, some stuff I pulled down over BitTorrent for a glance at what's coming hot out of Japan. And it eventually came to pass that Read or Die, the three-episode OAV that inspired this whole site to begin with, was re-invented as a 26-episode TV series. So, for AA's second birthday, I'm going to take a look at the evolution of the series that sparked the website: Read or Die: The TV.
Characters:
Then there's Maggie, tall and quiet and strange. Maggie likes small, cramped spaces and overall is a little dark. She speaks in a monotone half-whisper and sleepwalks from place to place, her personality all but overshadowed by her sisters'. Maggie, too, has an insatiable fondness for books, and uses paper to create enormous beasts to aid her in combat or to shuttle her sisters around the world. The star of the show, however, is Anita, the youngest of the three. Anita lacks the maturity and composure of her sisters (as is evidenced by her attack! attack! attack! style of fighting with her paper blades) and absolutely abhors books. Since Anita gets more screentime, backstory and support than her sisters (in the form of a small army of middle school friends) she becomes more fully developed as the series goes on. We get to see all of Anita's highs and lows, and lots of the ground in between. The sisters are hired to be live-in bodyguards for Nenene, an award-winning Japanese writer prone to
So that takes care of the new blood, and all's fine there. It's the returning cast where RoD: The TV takes a hit. Halfway through the series Yomiko and Nancy are re-introduced, both with new voice actors and totally new personalities. Nancy, rather than a sultry tough assassin, is now a child-like lobotomy patient. And Yomiko, once a nerdish but strong secret agent, is now a scared terrorist in hiding. Yomiko is one of the things that sold me on the RoD OAV two years ago; there's a reason she's in the header image of every page here on AA. So seeing her reduced from the perky, underconfident bookworm I knew and loved to this new ineffective "big sister" figure to Nancy was rough on me. The only time we see any glimpses of the old Yomiko, the one who loves books more than anything but will throw down when cornered, is when she's paired up with Anita late in the series. And even that isn't a guarantee -- indeed, in the end, when faced with the villain, the means, and the opportunity to make her move, *Yomiko just gives up and waits for the others to come and mop up her mess*. Her bad British accent doesn't do much to help her new persona, either. And boy howdy, I mean bad British accent.
Story:
One only has to look at the movie-to-series ratios of wheat vs. chaff on this site to see how I normally react to such nonsense. The first half of the series is fairly episodic. In each episode the sisters will be sent off on a mission for the big secret government agency with which they're employed, usually to retrieve a rare and expensive book. These action-y stories are interspersed with boring episodes featuring Anita's coma-inducingly dull classmates. The bipolar nature of the first half is sometimes confusing and tiresome. Ultimately, *the series takes a turn completely away from all the middle school drama built up between Anita and her friends, so it simply amounts to nothing.* At about the halfway point Yomiko and Nancy and Wendy and Mr. Joker are re-introduced. From here on, the plot takes a surreal turn for the crazy. Clones and brainwashing, conspiracies and botched genetic experiments, terrorism and kidnapping, betrayal and redemption and assassination and
By the fourth or fifth time Junior (*Nancy's artificially-aged son who is to become the vessel for the revival of the esteemed Mr. Gentleman*) changes sides, you're reeling from so many topsy-turvy plot threads that you'll go vertigo. And by the fifth or sixth time the villain (*that is, Mr. Joker, who was a good guy in the OAV*) spouts off his ingenious global plan (the specifics of which change each time he gets going) you're going to wish you had taken the blue pill. Compounding these problems is the fact that once the story really gets rolling, you're juggling Michelle and Maggie and Anita and Nenene and Nancy and Yomiko and Junior and Joker and Wendy and Drake all at once. There are episodes where entire chunks of the main cast are left out, not because of irrelevance to the plot, but simply because there wasn't time to fit them all in. The series completely forgets that Michelle and Maggie exist for a few episodes. The late story really tries to focus on Yomiko and Anita, and even devotes a whole episode to the two of them teaming up... but in doing so the more relevant plotlines (the ones concerning Nenene and Nancy and Junior, for example) get back-burnered in the worst way. In the end, none of the characters but *Joker and Junior* are really relevant, and everyone else is simply there to deal with the task of bringing down the bad guys. Which, in an action-oriented cartoon, is precisely how it should be. That's exactly how the OAV was. And the ending, while exactly what you'd expect, is satisfying. It's just that a lot of the build-up and backpedaling that you go through to get to that point can be frustrating at times; it's sort of like hacking your way through a vine-filled jungle just to end up back where you started.
Animation:
For example, Nenene doesn't just have a television. She has a widescreen plasma television that takes up almost an entire wall of her living room. Anita doesn't just have a stuffed frog, she has a froggy keychain attached to her backpack. If one were so inclined, one could just about pick the title off the spine of each and every book that cascades down on top of Michelle when she manages to
What these little details do, in addition to giving us a plethora of background information about the cast and setting, is set up an expectaion of realism. Aside from the color and configuration of some of the series's hairstyles (which could only exist in a carefully constructed anime environment) everything that's supposed to be real, looks real. As a result, the things that are supposed to be fantastic and outlandish look like an extension of that reality. Michelle's bow and Maggie's giant flying pterodon sidekick inevitably look right at home. There are times when the visuals actually look too realistic. This is most apparent in some of the computer-animated scenes, especially things like tilting glass and panning buildings. This of course is a small, nitpicky complaint. RoD: The TV is a series which takes cartoony visuals to the extreme point of realism, while still being cartoony; it just makes the places that slip over the edge (into the realm of "computer graphic-y", I guess) fairly noticably. One thing I absolutely love about the RoD OAV, which continues all the way to the end of The TV, is that all the great action scenes are really full of action. No freeze frames, no jerky roundhouse kicks, just good old-fashioned full-fat action. The fight scenes, especially the ones where Anita makes a couple of index-card blades and goes all ninja style, are completely riveting. All of the paper magic in general is a treat; Yomiko was pretty limited when she was on her own, but the way the sisters come together and unite their various specialties is exciting and unique in each of the major battles. It helps, of course, that all but four of the major players are cute girls (counting everyone but Maggie, who while not unattractive, certainly isn't "cute"). This is dipping, however, into the realm of fanservice, which is ripe for the pickin' in the next section...
Culture Shock:
There are two things, however, that I would like to take issue with. The first is the voice acting. Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad on any level. Most all the voices, especially Anita, are simply terrific. Anita's screams are particularly bloodcurdling in that perfect way a good scream should be bloodcurdling (as opposed to the generic anime screams you hear so often when girls scream just for lack of anything better to do). No, on the whole the voice acting is spot-on.
Okay, I promised I'd touch on fanservice. Fanservice, of course, is inevitable in a series populated with cute girls. Especially cute large-breasted girls. In RoD: The TV most of this fanservice is localized to the inserts along with each DVD, each of which depicts one of the leading ladies (and, in one case, the leading preteen boy) in various states of undress. The only one spared is Anita (though Anita's creepy friend Hisa shares her underthings with us on one of the inserts). This is, like I said, to be expected. Fanservice is just what anime does. I do, however, have a hang-up when it comes to nudity. There's a difference between nudity for the sake of the plot and nudity just for the sake of T&A. RoD: The TV never does the naked thing -- gratuitous or otherwise -- with its major cast... although you get the distinct impression that it wants to. There's one scene at around the episode ten mark where an unimportant one-shot character decides to strip for no good reason other than to show the camera some nipple. While the nipples themselves weren't bad, it did put the series into an uncomfortable place for me. How many more episodes until Michelle or Nenene dropped trou for the sake of fanservice? Or, God help us, Anita? I spent the next fourteen or fifteen episodes dreading the loss of respect I'd built up for these characters, which could have so easily been pissed away for the sake of a quick cheap money shot. Fortunately that never happened. The amoral floozy who sexied up my screen long ago never comes back, and the rest of the girls keep their threads intact. This isn't to say the sight of naked females displeases me; exactly the opposite is true. I love me some fanservice in many cases. But over the course of this particular series I felt like I was building up a rapport with the characters. Michelle, Nenene and Nancy especially are never portrayed as sex objects, so it's good to see that the series never took that particular aspect of their characters too far. There's things you do want and things you don't want your favorite characters to do. Seeing Yomiko au naturel is at the bottom of a very long list of things I wanted from Read or Die.
Scoring RoD: The TV overall was a difficult thing. No matter where I drop the hamhams my conscience disagrees. I can't give it four, because then I'm saying I liked it as much as the OAV, but that simply isn't true. At the same time though I can't say I liked it less than the OAV. Minute for minute, there's way more good stuff in The TV than the OAV. Of course, minute for minute, there's way more bad stuff too. Applying the quadratic formula to come up with a percentage doesn't really work either, because then I'd probably hit something in the mediocre three-ham area, which isn't fair to a series so near and dear to me.
Then you get to things like, well, the four-ham OAV was my first review, back before I really had a good benchmark. The TV on the other hand has 30-some reviews before it to measure against. Additionally, the OAV review is outdated; both in writing style (my reviews tend to be more emotional and less technical now that I've refined them a bit) and in actual sample (the review is based on a fansub, whereas now I have the English DVD to watch). Plus, there's the unfortunate mangling of my beloved Yomiko to consider. In the end, RoD: The TV is a fine series, no doubt. The great action and lovable cast alone are worth the price of admission. And, being perfectly honest, I'm only finding fault in areas that (in my opinion) don't stack up to the
For all its faults and retrofitting, RoD: The TV manages to be entertaining. And in the end that's what I've learned to look for in my two-year-long on-again/off-again anime marathon. RoD: The TV is good crunchy wheat.
Overall Rating:
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Carton Wars: The Pink-Haired Menace
A snapshot of Yomiko before she turned into a crybaby.
I've been waiting 25 episodes for this.
Sometimes the series tries to be Saved By the Bell.
One of many wasted opportunities to show someone getting the papercut of a lifetime.
One big happy family.