I'm easing slowly back into the anime world, and taking advantage of the many best-of-the-decade lists that marked the end of the 2010s to help with viewing options. I've been away a long time, and I don't know the landscape so well anymore, so I'm sticking with more familiar names first.
And there aren't many names as familiar for anime fans as Lupin III, the beloved master thief who has starred in multiple series and films since the early 70s. I've been hearing about the 2012 series, "Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" for a long time. It's biggest selling point is that full creative control was given over to a rare female director, Saya Yamamoto, with character and animation direction handled by Takeshi Koike, best known for the feature "Redline." Reviews promised more adult elements, in keeping with the earlier versions of the Lupin character. The show was successful enough, it's had three spinoff films with these versions of the characters.
So, it was a huge disappointment that "Fujiko Mine" turned out to be such juvenile stuff. It's adult only in the sense that our main character, femme fatale Fujiko (Miyuki Sawashiro), spends a lot of the show naked, and unapologetically likes sex and seducing men. It's novel in that it Fujiko firmly in the center of the narrative, and shows how she develops relationships with "Lupin" franchise characters like Jigen (Kiyoshi Kobayashi), Goemon (Dasiuke Namikawa), and Zenigata (Koichi Yamadera), independent of her beloved rival in crime, Lupin III (Kanishi Kurita). However, Fujiko's adventures are such tawdry stuff. In nearly every episode she ends up undressed and in soft-core porn poses, and her sexuality is used mainly for titillation. All the hints about deep, dark secrets in her past turn out to be red herrings. It's a darker take on the character, but one that's not doing her any favors. Even worse, Zenigata gets a new subordinate named Oscar (Yuki Kaji), a bundle of terrible gay and transgender sterotypes who is also a very vocal misogynist.
The series is definitely eye-catching, designed to look like '70s manga with retro character designs and great use of linework. On the other hand, this also makes it a little too easy for me to associate "Fujiko Mine" with the first two Animerama films - those curious, X-rated fantasy features that tried to juggle in-your-face erotica and cartoonish humor, often with disastrous results. It's a shame that the show leans into its most prurient elements so hard, because there are episodes of "Fujiko Mine" that I liked, and these versions of the Lupin characters are appealing. A big irony is that Lupin himself has his usual horndog behavior toned way, way down, and he's as much fun as ever. I liked the show enough to watch it all the way through, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.
Now on to "Tatami Galaxy," directed by the dependable Masaaki Yuasa. The eleven episode series follows a college student (Shintaro Asanuma) who lives a different version of his first two years of campus life in each episode. In each universe, created when he makes a different choice about which university club to join, he is lead astray by his friend Ozu (Hiroyuki Yoshino) and finds himself drawn to a girl named Akashi (Maaya Sakamoto). The animation by Madhouse in Yuasa's usual Superflat style is beautifully fluid, and in some episodes mixed with live action elements. The show is very dialogue heavy, with the hero often monologuing at breakneck speeds. I recommend the dubbed version unless you're very comfortable with subtitles.
This is another anime that I've been meaning to watch for ages. It's a delightful existential romp through the psyche of an oversexed, insecure, zealously idealistic loser, who thinks all his troubles are due to bad luck, and is only disabused of that notion through metaphysical shenanigans. It's also a beautiful, inventive, experiment in visual storytelling that's comparable to watching someone perform variations on a musical theme. We watch the same elements, characters, and situations remixed and reintroduced over and over again, and it remains compelling, funny, and wildly entertaining the whole way through. The high point is one of the later episodes, "The 4½ Tatami Ideologue," where the protagonist gets lost in an endless maze made up of different versions of his own room.
Like "Fujiko Mine," "Tatami Galaxy" has its share of salacious elements, including a character who owns and obsesses over a "love doll." The difference here is that the sexual elements are much more restrained and largely played for laughs. The protagonist's libido is represented by a hapless CGI cowboy named Johnny (Noboyuki Hiyama). There are also some good female characters, Akashi and a rowdy post-grad named Hanuki (Yuko Kaida), who keep the protagonist on his toes. It's hard not to become fond of all the characters in the end, after seeing them in so many different situations and complications. Even the protagonist, as infuriatingly immature and self-deluded as he is sometimes, had me rooting for him to get the girl in the end.
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