First Impressions / Series Introduction / Snapshots

OP Sequence

OP: 「ハイスペックDays」 (Haisupekku Days) by 大島はるな (Oushima Haruna)

「1」

I’ve been hearing about the death of the anime industry for a very long time. And as one would for the proverbial boy who cried wolf, I’ve stopped worrying about it. Sure, we’re long past the golden age of anime when the rivers ran with talent and budget, but the industry chugs on nonetheless, though perhaps at the expense of the sanity of the poor souls who actually have to make the anime. A slow and manageable decline, however, does not grab headlines as snappily as THE DEATH OF ANIME, AGAIN, and as a blogger always in search of material you can guess at which tone I’d prefer to take. Spring 2016, though, has unfortunately been a season full of variety and depth, which frustrates my attempts to spin a sensationalist narrative. But there is one bright spark of mediocrity in this dark abyss of quality, and that is Wagamama High Spec. This show is the distillation of all of Japanese popular visual media into a single five minute bite of lucidity. This is at once the cancer killing anime, and brilliant perfection. Because Wagahai, unlike any other anime, gets it. Observe.

So we’ve got these four girls. They go to a high school, because of course. Otherwise, we don’t know who they are. We don’t know why they’re here. We don’t know what they do.

Okay, time to strip!

This is everything. This is anime.

For those who didn’t read about this show in the preview, Wagahai is essentially a promotion for a visual novel that’s not quite out yet, and is slated for translation into English later this year. What we have here, really, is a five minute commercial for some other product every week. There’s some cardboard cutouts (the irony!) who will try explain what it’s all about, but let’s not kid ourselves, is any of it really important? Wagahai is a short, so it needs to get to the point straight away. Look, breasts! This is what we’re selling. We’re done!

Even the great Shinkai Makoto, one of anime’s greatest sons, has Cross Road, which was very pretty but was literally a two minute ad for a correspondence study company. These days, anime doesn’t sell. So it needs to sell.

And so here we have it, anime in its purest form, a fanservice comedy with no need for pretense or even premise. It got hot in there, so they needed to take off their clothes. Hey, don’t laugh, there’s a rapper who made a lot of money off this simple idea. And in that light, Wagamama High Spec is doing everything right.

Omake

22 Comments

  2. Yeap, I should probably slice of my dick and grill it in the sun right now… My heart, it can’t take it no more. The cultural madness turning dogmatic zeitgeist is on its way of converting me into another one of its half-brained spores… NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

    1/1 will put creative faith into the sewer

    Mihashi Nishizawa
    Reply

    1. But Hai-Furi has big ass ships, and cute girls in navy uniforms, and boom boom (I mean cannon fire, not the other boom boom..!), and… SHIPS! This thing here has only girls with breasts the size of their heads!

      Tassadar
      Reply

  4. Is it bad that I literally have so little interest in this anime that the only thing that brought me to this comment section was the questionable grammar in the first line of the review?

    “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime, and wept with the sorrow.”

    I think it should be “weep”. Either that or “he did”…

    quigonkenny
    Reply

    1. Seperate clause makes it fine.

      For example: “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime, and was sore afraid”

      vs

      “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime, and is sore afraid”

      Coco of Aquitaine
      Reply

      1. Actually, neither of those is correct, but that’s because you changed the second verb to a “be”, which is incompatible grammatically with the preceding “did”.

        Going back to the original line:

        “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime, and wept with the sorrow.”

        In this layout, with the “did” before the “he”, the “did” must be taken into account when conjugating both subsequent verbs. Every separate phrase after the “he” has to read as if attached to everything before.

        “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime.”

        “(And, lo, did he) weep with the sorrow.”

        If you absolutely want to use “wept”, you have two choices. If you use “he did” rather than “did he”, then that frees up the second verb phrase to be conjugated separately from the “did”, so it simply needs to be past tense.

        “And, lo, he did look upon the face of anime.”

        “(And, lo, he) wept with the sorrow.”

        Alternately, you could keep “did he” and insert a second “he” before “wept”, turning the second phrase into a separate clause.

        “And, lo, did he look upon the face of anime, and he wept with the sorrow.”

        That kind of ruins the “King James” sound to it, though.

        quigonkenny
        Reply

  5. This is your specialty, Pa-kun. Not military anime or high brow anime. It’s taking the shadiest, most craven anime of each season, and alternate between eviscerating and lauding it.

    Look upon what we have wrought, ye fans of anime! Look upon it and despair, for this is the future!

    *thunder rolls, goats bleat, waifus cry*

    Stilts
    Reply

    3. Look upon what we have wrought, ye fans of anime! Look upon it and despair, for this is the future!

      *thunder rolls, goats bleat, waifus cry*

      LOL now this ^ is awesome, mind if I quote you on that one Stilts?

      Kazakiri
      Reply

  10. Short as they were, Wakaba Girl‘s slice-of-life antics were enjoyable to watch and Ninja Slayer–despite the limited animation–actually had a narrative while using the fanservice as a topping to spice things up. (Nancy Lee and Dragon Yukano, anyone?)

    This show, on the other hand… Oh, who am I kidding, this is exactly what Âge (the Muv-Luv franchise) would do if they wanted to promote a new work on a shoestring budget!

    Yeah, this is definitely a low-priority show to watch. One does not live on fanservice alone.

    Incognito
    Reply

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