Tag: reviews

Anime Review: ‘Fairy Musketeers’

I never knew how much I needed to see Little Red Riding Hood in a sword duel with Gretel until I watched Fairy Musketeers.

Fairy Musketeers (Otogi-Jūshi Akazukin). Starring Nobuyuki Hiyama, Rie Kugimiya, and Motoko Kumai. Directed by Takaaki Ishiyama, et al. TV Tokyo, . 39 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 940 minutes). Not rated.

Available on Crunchyroll.

In the post-Madoka days when most magical girl anime is about blood, guts, and misery, or else full of snarky “irony,” I like to look back on an earlier, slightly more innocent time when magical girl stories were about giggly, fidgety females who saved the world in between shopping trips and junk-food binges. And when I look back on that time, I like to watch Fairy Musketeers. Fairy Musketeers is not the best-written magical girl show, nor is it the best animated, nor the best edited. But it has an intriguing premise, a likable collection of characters, a satisfying conclusion, and a sweetness that avoids becoming saccharine.

The Fairy Musketeers pose dramatically.
No magical-girl show is complete without goofy catchphrases.

Originally produced as an OVA (that is, a straight-to-video production, which doesn’t have the same stigma in Japan that it has in the States), Fairy Musketeers was later expanded into a 39-episode TV series, which is the more readily available version. Merchandising heavily dictated its content, and the show has a few out-of-place props and plot swerves as a result. Although it drags at times, it’s consistently fun. It is one of my all-time favorites, and it’s clean enough to let the kids watch.

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‘Secret Jouju’ in English!

My family has been struck down by the Wuhan coronavirus, though we’re lucky enough to have caught it in a variant that amounts to little more than lassitude and a mild head cold. Since we’re sick and off work, we’ve spent this time lounging around, complaining, and watching too much television.

I have mentioned before that I recently bought my toddler daughter a pair of training chopsticks that serendipitously introduced me to the Korean magical-girl series Secret Jouju, a CGI cartoon aimed at young girls and built around a toy line. At the time, I was unable to discover any detailed information about the series or find episodes in any language except Korean.

More recently, however, I stumbled upon the series in English. It’s actually right there on the official YouTube channel for the franchise, but despite being owned by Google, YouTube’s search function failed to discover it for me. Instead, I ultimately found it through Brave Search.

Here’s an embed of the first episode of the first season. Anyone interested can easily find the rest of the English-dubbed episodes from there:

My daughter is barely beginning to speak in complete sentences, but she can already say “Choochoo” (Jouju) and even wave her hand around and cry, “Chiriring chiriring,” which is Jouju’s catch-phrase when she casts spells. So, despite some shortcomings, this show clearly appeals to its target demographic.

Also, if my daughter has to watch some television, I’d rather it be something obscure like this where an ocean separates her from the toy franchise it’s based on. Unlike some other toy franchises, she won’t be able to see Jouju anywhere and everywhere to the point that she is tempted to build her personality around it.

First Impressions

Conceptually, Secret Jouju appears to take its inspiration from Pretty Cure and Sailor Moon with arguably a dash of Winx Club, though it has toned everything down and mushed everything together to the point that it lacks individuality. Although most magical-girl titles have franchise tie-ins, this one feels especially like a weekly toy advertisement, a feeling that is not helped by the look of the cheap animation, which makes the characters look like plasticky action figures.

That being said, the character designs—which improve notably over the course of the series—are fetching and also a relief from the sexually provocative designs that have come to characterize Japanese magical girls in their late stage. Jouju and her friends prefer flowing gowns (reminiscent perhaps of Wedding Peach) rather than micro-minis and bikini tops, which make me more comfortable letting my daughter watch this.

The Plot

When I reviewed the Korean magical-girl series Flowering Heart, I noted that it jumps into the story with almost no explanation. Secret Jouju does something similar.

The premise (what there is of it) is that Jouju is a fairy from the Fairy Tale Kingdom. One day, she impersonates the princess Cinderbella in order to woo a handsome prince and convince him to marry her. However, the real Cinderbella then shows up and reveals the deception. As if that weren’t enough, an evil witch suddenly attacks the kingdom. Jouju attempts to fight the witch but loses her magic in the process. Sensing this crisis, a magical item called the Secret Diary activates and seals away the witch—but also seals away everyone else in the Fairy Tale Kingdom, Jouju excepted.

The next day, Jouju wakes up to find a talking teddy bear and the Secret Diary in her bed. Both give her instructions to travel to Earth where she must make friends and help others in order to return Fairy Land’s inhabitants to normal. Each friend she makes receives a “Secret Flower” to make her a member of Jouju’s magical girl team. And although Jouju is oblivious, the viewer will easily discern that the longsuffering talking teddy bear following her around is actually the prince she’s in love with.

Comment

There’s something interesting here that I, as an adult, would like to see explored in more depth, though the intended audience of early-elementary girls might be bored with it: Jouju’s former job as a fairy had been to turn girls into princesses, which apparently means that she served in the role of the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story, granting girls their wishes in order to ensure their happily-ever-afters.

But Jouju had found, she tells us, that these girls were always ungrateful for what she’d given them, so she finally decided to use her power on herself instead. All of this is delivered to us in brief hints, leaving us to fill out most of the details ourselves, but it informs much of Jouju’s behavior: She insists that she never again wants to use magic to help other people—even though doing so is the only way to restore the Fairy Kingdom.

The Heroine

When I first came across this series and watched some of it in Korean, what I saw came from later seasons, so some elements of this first season have surprised me. The first surprise is the character design, which is primitive in the first season but improves later on.

As a second surprise, Jouju in the early episodes is decidedly obnoxious. Taking inspiration from Sailor Moon, the heroine here is thick-witted, selfish, and gluttonous. She differs from Sailor Moon in a few important aspects, however: She is headstrong rather than cowardly, and she grows noticeably over the course of this series, whereas Sailor Moon’s character flaws (in the animated version, at least) get turned into a running gag.

A parent can easily see that Jouju’s shortcomings are things that Jouju needs to overcome if she is to complete the Diary’s tasks and save Fairyland, but I wonder if my tiny daughter is getting the same message or is merely thinking that Jouju’s funny antics are worthy of imitation.

The Dub

If a subtitled version of this show exists, I have not found it. The options at the moment appear to be the Korean version with no subtitles and an English version. While imperfect, the dub gives the impression that the voice actresses are sincerely giving it their all despite dubious material.

The dialogue frequently plods, but some of this awkwardness is clearly due to the young target audience: Characters express themselves in clear, simple terms and often say things in more than one way as if speaking to someone who has difficulty understanding. Since the intended audience is probably about five years old, we should excuse these affectations even though they sound unnatural to an adult. The dub frustrates me occasionally, but I don’t feel fit to judge it.

Overall Impressions

I have barely scratched the surface of what is now an extensive franchise with multiple seasons. Although I intend to keep seeing it with my daughter, I’m not binge-watching because I don’t want to let her watch too much television, so this post is a set of first impressions rather than a thorough review. My thinking at the moment is that this is little more than a generic magical-girl title for the youngest audience. Jouju’s bitterness over her role in Fairyland is intriguing, though it’s unlikely to get thorough exploration and probably couldn’t hold the attention of the average adult viewer.

Cirsova Reviews ‘Rags and Muffin’

The blog of Cirsova: The Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense has produced a new review of Rags and Muffin:

This one was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit. All I knew going in was crime-fighting catgirl with an Asian dragon dog. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Certainly not an incredibly rich fantasy setting heavily inspired by Indian mythology.

As an aside, the “pseudo Indian” (as he calls it) setting almost didn’t happen. When I first started this project, the setting was a more generic dystopian city vaguely resembling Blade Runner. But while I pondered what kind of city it was, I mused that it might be a religious capital; I then asked myself, “Which religion?” and the answer instantly came, “All of them.” After that, an early test reader said the book had an “Indian vibe,” which further encouraged me to build the world in that direction.

Also, the novel’s conception of religion is partly drawn from the syncretistic and drug-fueled stew that was Vedantism and perennialism in the 1960s. The portrayal of people getting doses of hallucinogenic drugs as a shortcut to mystical experience is ultimately inspired, albeit indirectly, by Timothy Leary, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate through third-rate philosophers like Huston Smith, John Hick, and Marcus Borg. Of course, Leary, Huxley, and their disciples were all enamored of Hinduism, however deficient their understanding of it, so a pseudo-Hindu setting seemed appropriate for a story about a world where drugs and religion are inextricably linked.

But what ultimately convinced me to go all out with the Indian elements was my happy discovery that the religious practice I invented as a central feature of my fictional world—the worship of young girls as living goddesses—exists in real life. Although I obviously employed a lot of artistic license in my fantastical portrayal of it, kumari puja is a real thing: It is particularly prominent in Nepalese Buddhism, but there are versions of it in India as well. In the world of Rags and Muffin, of course, it is essential to every religion, which is why early chapters give the reader brief glimpses of both Christian and Tibetan Buddhist kumaris.

Cirsova also says,

I used to be something of a Hindu Mythology wonk in my younger years, so this was a pleasant surprise. Davidson incorporates the cultural textures without overly romanticizing them, showing both the beautiful aspects which Lord Curzon fell in love with as well as the ugly and downright evil.

If I depicted anything as evil, it was on account of plot necessity rather than personal opinion. My attitude toward India and its neighbors is about as neutral as it is possible to be: I am enamored of Indian culture and people, but my view of their history, religion, and mythology is almost purely academic. The Bhagavad-gita is a book I like to return to from time to time, but mostly because it has fine passages; I am not especially moved by its sweeping theology nor repulsed by its amoral and fatalistic stance on ethics.

Even kumari puja, which often exercises Western philanthropists and busybodies who believe Nepal’s worshiped girls are being abused, is a practice on which I have no strong opinion. On the one hand, I find it a rather charming form of idolatry. On the other hand, I think its critics are likely correct that it leaves its pampered girls unprepared to cope with the real world once their stint as goddesses is over. But on the gripping hand, Reuters and the BBC hate the practice, as revealed by their frequent exposes on the subject, and anything those organizations hate must have something good about it.

On another note, it was originally my intent to be entirely agnostic about the religious beliefs and practices portrayed in the book, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions as to whether any of the mystical experiences are real or just drug-induced hallucinations. However, as the story developed, I reached a point where I was forced to reveal that the gods truly exist, which I partly regret.

Cirsova has one prominent criticism, which is quite fair:

There’s a lot of excellent worldbuilding in Rags & Muffin, but as a book, it’s a little all over the place in setting things up. A number of seemingly unrelated events, as well as side excursions of the main characters, tie in to the world and add a backdrop to the story but go nowhere on their own in this volume.

He’s correct that the book spends some time hanging Chekov’s Guns to be fired in later volumes, but part of the problem he detects is that I blended two different types of stories without complete success: This is first of all an action story, which requires a tight structure. But it’s also a milieu story, which is allowed to wander around.

That’s why there’s a sub-story, starting in chapter seven, in which an elaborate, city-wide, syncretistic religious ritual ends incongruously with a terrorist blowing up a bus: That sequence exists purely to show you what kind of world I’m drawing you into. Plotwise, it is barely justified because it introduces both Rags’s medical problem and the characters of Miss Marie and her henchmen, but its true purpose is to display the city, which is really the main character of the book.

Buy Rags and Muffin here.

Review: ‘Magical Angel Creamy Mami’

Creamy Mami, the Magical Angel, directed by Osamu Kobayashi. Written by Hiroshi Konichikawa et al. Starring Takako Ōta. Studio Pierrot, 1983–1984. 52 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 20 hours, 48 minutes). Rated TV-14.

We haven’t reviewed an anime series here in a good long while. In large part, that’sibecause I’m married with children now, so I don’t have as much time to binge-watch TV as I once did. Besides that, I admit my interest in magical girls has waned slightly. Like, I have to deal with real-life girls now.

Anyway, Magical Angel Creamy Mami, which ran from 1983 to 1984, is a title I have wanted to see for over a decade, but aside from a short-lived Blu-Ray release that I sadly didn’t acquire in time, it has been almost completely unavailable in the U.S. except through piracy.

Recently, however, Creamy Mami appeared on streaming services. As of this writing, it is available on Amazon Prime, which is where I found it, but you can also watch it for free on RetroCrush, a service that streams older anime titles and which, notably, also hosts Magical Emi and Pastel Yumi, two other classics from the same era and studio. I’ll probably watch and review those next.

Creamy Mami singing.
Creamy Mami.

A review of Creamy Mami could be one sentence: If you are interested in magical girls, you should watch it. This holds such a place of importance in the history of the genre that any comments I might make about quality or entertainment value are largely unimportant.

But I’ll try anyway.

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Artisan Book Reviews and ‘Rags and Muffin’

Artisan Book Reviews has this to say about my novel Rags and Muffin:

In the imaginative and exhilarating young adult fantasy novel, Rags and Muffin (Deus ex Magical Girl Book 1) by D. G. D. Davidson, a team of young friends fight to free a young girl from a ruthless pimp.

Though mystic and majestic with its centuries-old temples, Godtown is also a city fraught with criminals, warring gangs, and a history marred by consistent war. In the city which is now occupied by the powerful Elysian Empire, criminality and skirmishes are still rampant. Among the city’s residents are hybrids who have special, mystical powers. Rags is one of these and is intent on fighting off criminals within the short time she has left.

The novel builds a believable world complete with its own language, political and religious scene, and landscape. Striking descriptions of the city’s splendor and detailed accounts that paint lifelike images of the city’s underbelly are included. As the Ragtag army moves through slums to execute their plan, the novel includes precise details that depict the city’s filth and various ruins. Its elaborate coverage also extends to its characters. Members of the Ragtag Army are described in depth with details that flesh them out as some of the main characters in the book. Their extensive backgrounds are included and their friendships are covered. The book is packed with fierce action scenes which involve numerous fights between the team and the criminals they encounter. In a city that is rife with dangerous clashes, other exciting confrontations also appear. The novel’s paranormal elements enhance the story. Mystical events such as when Rags, being a hybrid, is able to subdue her opponents through her supernatural powers generate suspense. Explanations about other hybrid abilities and weaknesses are also captivating. The Ragtag team’s clandestine operations are unknown to their parents which adds tension and excitement to their escapades. Some of their activities and experiences are light-hearted and they balance the novel’s more harrowing scenes.

The immersive descriptions, fascinating scenes and heroic, compelling characters make Rags and Muffin by D. G. D. Davidson an engaging story. The novel will be a delightful read for fans of urban fantasy looking for a creative novel set in a dynamic, absorbing world. Rags and Muffin (Deus ex Magical Girl Book 1) by D. G. D. Davidson comes highly recommended by Artisan Book Reviews.

The Pulps: ‘Tough Enough’

The collection of Western stories ends with a tale by Luke Short, who was as popular as Max Brand and whose work inspired multiple movies. “Tough Enough” was published in Argosy, the mother of pulps, in 1937.

This story follows the familiar premise of the stranger who rides into a town run by a criminal gang and leaves a trail of bodies behind him. Fisful of Dollars has of course become the archetype of that story but didn’t originate it, and the Short’s story differs enough from the now-established cliches to hold a few surprises. There are some secret identities and a double cross, and the tale is both well-told and generally engaging.

The Pulps: ‘The Ghost’

After an all-too-brief sampling of sports and war stories, The Pulps delivers a larger collection of of westerns. As is proper, it opens with a big name, Max Brand, whom editor Tony Goodstone credits for the western genre’s transition from more realistic to more fantastic, larger-than-life stories. Brand (real name Frederick Faust) is one of those curious writers who disdain their own careers, wanting recognition for “serious” literary work but instead finding success in popular fiction. Brand wanted to be a poet but was instead a successful, prolific, and popular author of cowboy adventures.

“The Ghost” is an early example of Brand’s work, published in 1919 in All-Story Weekly and again in Adventure in 1929. According to Goodstone, Brand was a great lover of classical mythology and based the story’s titular antihero on the god Pan, though I admit I would not have guessed that without Goodstone’s guidance. The “Ghost” is a brilliant thief plaguing a gold-rush town. Although he never kills his victims, he robs them blind and then disappears into a box canyon. The townsmen hire Silver Pete, a gunslinger with a shady past, to track the Ghost to his lair.

Playfulness and trickery follows, with the Ghost finding devious means to get the upper hand. Most remarkable about his character, and causing the reader to root for him despite his thievery, is his insistence on never taking a life. This is particularly notable because the story takes place in a setting where authors usually depict life as cheap. Though the story’s resolution is enjoyable, it is marred by its requirement that one of the major characters carry the idiot ball.

The story certainly illustrates Goodstone’s claim that Brand heralded a transition from realistic to mythical western adventures. The setting is nowhere in particular, and the characters and events have a markedly unreal quality to them. Brand had not yet personally visited the West when he wrote this story, and he does not appear even slightly interested in verisimilitude or realistic details.

The Pulps: ‘The Flaming Arrow’

Although this anthology does feature one additional example from a sports pulp, that example is a recount of a real event rather than a work of fiction, so we will pass over it and move to the next section, which is dedicated to World War I military aviation. The military section contains only one short story, George Bruce’s “Flaming Arrow,” originally published in The Lone Eagle in 1934.

Our editor and guide, Tony Goodstone, points out that writers of this type of fiction were concerned primarily with the specifics of the aircraft they wrote about. Bruce’s story is an example of this: It very much cares about the Nieuport the protagonist flies and the Fokkers and Pfalzes he dogfights with. This is a great example of action fiction: Bruce balances out the technical specifics with exciting depictions of aerial gun battles.

He is, however, less concerned with military strategy, so even a lay reader will discover several implausibilities in this story. The plot revolves around Ace Avery, a skilled pilot, who receives a suicide mission—he is to fly solo into enemy airspace and bomb a factory where the Germans are developing a new, super form of mustard gas capable of wiping out a small country in one drop.

Questions abound: Why would destroying one manufacturing plant assure that the Germans couldn’t produce this deadly material somewhere else? Why don’t the Germans make some kind of arrangements to protect their formula after they become aware of Avery’s mission (which they do)?

More especially, why does Avery have to fly solo? Supposedly, this gives him better odds, but he fails the mission on his first run … so he simply tries again the next day. The Germans already know he’s coming, so he has no stealth advantage. Why not bring more guns? Why not, as was common in World War II, send additional fighters to protect the bomber?

We don’t get answers to these questions, but they aren’t important. What makes the story work is its combination of genuinely exciting action with the protagonist’s inner struggle. Despite his reputation as the best flying ace in the skies, Avery is a man unsure of himself, someone doing his duty but not particularly brave or at all cocksure, who merely found that he has an especial talent for handling an aeroplane. There is nothing original about his character, but he is likable, and since he is the only character that the story presents to us, “The Flaming Arrow” has a chance for greater psychological depth, such as it is, than most of the other pulps in this collection. It is a convincing portrait of a man at war even if that man’s particular mission sounds unlikely.

‘Rags and Muffin’ Reviewed on Reedsy

Excellent for fans of dark fantasy anime and manga, though perhaps jarring to those who only read western fantasy.

Jennifer deBie at Reedsy Discovery praises Rags and Muffin:

Broadly speaking, in western literature authors tend to populate their novels with characters the age of their intended audience. A novel full of teenagers going on adventures is meant for the YA market. A chapter-book full of pre-teens is aimed at middle grade readers. A novel full of women in their 30s and 40s is largely geared towards women in their 30s and 40s, and any readers from outside that demographic who buy and enjoy the book are a nice bonus for the author, publisher, and bookseller.

This is a book almost entirely populated by children, but please do not give it to children. These are child soldiers fighting a graphic war in a city waiting to swallow, exploit, and destroy all of the children it can sink teeth into.

This is not a book for children, or the faint of heart.

That said, D. G. D. Davidson’s Rags and Muffin, the first entry in his Deus ex Magical Girl series, is a complex sequence of interlinking narratives, following various members of the titular Rags’ gang as they go through a particularly perilous few days. While the kids’ adventures unfold, Davidson takes readers through a whirlwind tour of Godtown itself and the complex native religion, centered almost entirely on maintaining caste and worshiping powerful girls born from the union of a human and the native marjara, a race of cat people. These daughters, or hybrids, the only viable offspring from such couplings as far as we are told, are born with an innate connection to the Goddess and thus her power and are destined by their genetics to die before they reach adulthood, preferably after spending the majority of their short lives being worshiped in a temple as an incarnation of their Goddess on earth.

Rags, the Ragamuffin to her enemies and Miss Anne to adults, along with her gang of child-disciples, is on a mission to save her fellow hybrids from those who would exploit or enslave them for their power through a combination of acrobatic hand-to-hand combat and heavy artillery. This never-ending battle for the soul of Godtown is further complicated by the soldiers of the occupying Elysian Empire, would-be colonizers who enforce their laws with war machines called runebots, and an iron fist.

If all of that sounds complicated and potentially violent, the answers are yes, and very.

Luckily, Davidson is an able storyteller with a knack for describing his chosen world and crafting his characters. Sights, smells, and sounds are brought to life with startling clarity, as are every bruise, broken bone, and bleeding wound the children experience. The children themselves are drawn with unerring precision, each characterized by their own linguistic quirks and subconscious drives. This is an author with a true talent for bringing his work to life, even if the results are potentially jarring to an audience accustomed to western narratives, novels, and tropes.

However, readers with experience in eastern media, particularly manga and anime from Japan, will notice a more than passing resemblance between Rags and Muffin and several franchises from that quarter. Most notably certain “girls with guns” properties, like Shikabane Hime and Black Lagoon, as well as dark fantasy/urban fantasy series like Soul Eater/Soul Eater Not, Dance in the Vampire Bund, and Blood-C.

Head over to Reedsy Discovery to upvote the review, which will help me promote the novel! And buy your copy here.

The Pulps: ‘The Devil Must Pay’

This short story by Frederick C. Painton was originally published in Argosy in 1937. Built on the foundation of a colorful and forceful personality, its builds to exciting action and a redemptive “twist” ending that’s predictable but satisfying, if not set up as well as it could be.

The narrator is an angry man and unwilling sidekick of a gangster named Jack Gore. Jack once rescued him from muggers in Marseilles but then robbed him himself. The narrator then joins his gang in the hopes of one day either killing him himself or seeing him get his comeuppance.

After some further shenanigans, the story focuses in on a gun-running operation in Palestine. Light on geographical precision or local color, the story is heavy on action as Jack Gore’s convoy first saves a Bedouin village from raiders and then gets caught in a firefight with British soldiers. Outgunned, Jack and his dwindling supply of men try to hold out until the Arab rebels they’re supplying arrive.

This is a good workmanlike action story unremarkable except for its entertainment value. Well-written and with a fascinating character at its center, it is obvious that it belongs in this collection as a fine example of pulp writing.