girl cartoons

With five episodes aired, Ookami-san and her Seven Companions has, to many, shown itself to be a slickly-produced but generally vapid bit of entertainment: while its fairy-tale allusions give it a lush and full world in which to play out, little of any real significance has been done with them. However, just below the surface, Ookami-san seems about to bubble over with some truly intriguing ideas. For instance, in episode 05, Liszt’s speech detailing the workings of the Aragami Syndicate has set a perfect stage for a treatise on the conflicts of personal freedom and the importance of societal infrastructures.

But perhaps most interesting is the show’s protagonist, Ookami - that is, the fact that Ookami is the protagonist. Ookami-san clearly adheres to the moe aesthetic, and shows signs of the ever-more-popular adherence to an Azuma-esque database model of character definition, albeit played with in its grounding every character in an established cultural myth. However, in contrast to most shows in this vein, while the series is clearly marketed toward males the central character is female.

In nearly all anime of the moe aesthetic, if named male characters occur at all (in contrast to, say, K-ON! or Strike Witches), a male character is almost certainly the protagonist; that is, whether or not they are the most important element of the plot’s progression, the story unfolds from their point of view and is framed around their personal struggle. Zero no Tsukaima is about Saito; Angel Beats! is about Otonashi; even Chu-Bra!! is told largely from the perspective of Komachi seeing Nayu’s world from the outside.

This is a pattern one can observe in nearly any medium, genre and cutlure - if a work is marketed to a specific gender, its protagonist’s gender will very often reflect that. However, in recent anime marketed at an adult male audience, this has become not just a cultural custom but in many senses a defining part of the genre, largely because of its friendliness to viewer insertion. The ever-growing presence of moe fetishism and escapism in both the creative and marketing aspects of the moe aesthetic hinge upon the ability for the viewer to imagine (primarily) himself in the shoes of the protagonist.

But Ookami-san quite clearly revolves around Ookami herself, and not Ryoushi, the strongest viewer-insert candidate. The plot reflection moments are in Ookami’s room with Ringo, and narrative elements are arranged such that Ookami fills the classic action protagonist role. For example, in the school-storming scene in episode 05, the show plays the common pattern of whittling the team down to just one character from each side in the final confrontation - here, that character is Ookami-san, and Ryoushi is simply one amongst many heroic sacrifices made to help her reach her goal.

Moreover, Ryoushi’s defining character attributes are all suggestive of a supporting character: a distinctive accent, a crippling fear played for laughs, and a degree of explicit sincerity which is strikingly rare among male protagonists. He is defined and given concrete personality to a point which makes him, if not useless, then of very narrow use as a viewer-insert. He is a sympathetic character, but in the way that a real character is, rather than a character designed to be the focal point of the audience’s fantasies.

Ookami-san isn’t a show about an average high school boy trying to win over an outwardly-cold girl, but a show about a girl trying to deal with her growing feelings for a boy who confessed to her. The fantasy is not served to the viewer on a silver platter.

However, Ookami is still very clearly sexualized, and presented as an object of desire - this is, after all, a show aimed at men. Her fanservice-friendly uniform and the narrator’s regular comments on her bust size clearly mark her as a character who is being objectified for the audience’s titillation, even as she is the locus of the show’s emotional narrative. A clear parallel in this regard from the shoujo market is D.N.Angel, an ongoing manga and 2003 anime: the main character Niwa Daisuke, and his alter-ego Dark, are the point from which the story is told and the character around whom the romance revolves. However, Dark is - as a defining character trait - visually a tall and atractive bishounen of the sort shoujo manga normally use as the subject of fanservice and objectification.

In not just ignoring but actively subverting the established gender mores of their readership, both Ookami-san and D.N.Angel force the viewer to consider their relationship with the work more closely, without necessarily being aggressive or deconstructive. Rather than attempting to destroy the viewer’s fantasy altogether, they opt to explore and interrogate that fantasy, on the viewer’s own terms.

With three episodes aired, Shukufuku no Campanella is a competent show by many standards - it sports an impressive voice cast, decent animation and fun character designs. However, those elements outside of its production values tell a very different story. The setting, plot, characters and dialogue are all extremely simplistic and one-dimensional; but the way they are presented suggests not so much a lack of competence on the creators’ part but rather an active effort to excise all depth and conflict from the setting.

Escapism plays an important role in all art; fantasy, as a genre, makes particular use of it. But here Shukufuku does not simply weave escapism into its narrative, the escapism is placed at the forefront of its priorities. Shukufuku accomplishes nothing but escapism. The show’s denizens exhibit not the roughness of a writer without the inspiration or talent to write characters of substance, but rather a series of faces which have been perfectly sanded down to an absence of any unique personailties or ideas.

Leicester, the player-insert in the eroge Shukufuku is based on, is odd among self-inserts in that he is not, as in harems such as Clannad or Love Hina, made up of a bare set of traits and flaws which the average otaku is meant to identify with; rather, he lacks even the definition afforded to those characters, leaving almost no mental impression whatsoever.

The plot, too, is purified of any meaningful conflict or progression: the action scenes play out in such a way that the show appears to be constantly assuaging the viewer that everything will be all right - that there is not the slightest possibility of anything actually going wrong, and that there neither is nor ever was any real threat present.

But what makes this different from the swaths of slice-of-life and iyashikei anime on the market? These are shows which in many cases appear similar: little to no conflict, often one- or two-dimensional characters and so on. Still, for the most part, slice-of-life shows centered around real-life settings use that format as an alternative to classical narrative, still in pursuit of making some statement about life but via a new means of communication. Iyashikei franchises such as Aria and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, similarly, use their otherworldly setting and eccentric pacing to communicate ideas about those parts of life not exciting enough to support a classical narrative.

In short, they still act as art, as attempts to explore and understand the human experience - a goal which Shukufuku sets aside from the start. It acts not as art, designed to provoke thought or entertainment, but rather as a kind of cheap sustenance for the mind. It stimulates the viewer in the way that shaking keys excites a baby - the sights and sounds are tailored not to engage the viewer in their world, but to distract the viewer from the one around them. It is, in a sense, the ultimate manifestation of Azuma’s “cultural database” - a series of images presented solely to sate the otaku’s craving for new tropes and memes to organize.