Mixed opinions of long running shounen series

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the motivation to write about anime, whether articles be reviews or blogs or whatever. I think anyone who’s been involved in anime-writing, or any sort of writing, professional or amateur has probably felt that at one stage. Really, it should be far too early for me to feel that, with respect to this blog, seeing as this is only my sixth article and one of them doesn’t count. Whatever… maybe if I had the time and effort to devote myself more to anime and reading about anime as I could while I was on a break, I could find the inspiration from other people’s work to write about things that I, myself, find interesting. It’s not happening at the moment, and real life is much to blame for that. I had such a busy week this week that on Friday night I crashed at 7.30pm and didn’t awaken until 9.00am the next morning. Anyway, while the internal conflict of finding the motivation to write would make for an interesting topic, it’s not going to be discussed this week. This week I’ll be spitting out a generic anime opinion in the form of a poorly thought-through article with minimal passion. If you happen to find what I write in this article interesting, it’s no fault of mine and purely coincidental.

Shounen anime is in the “news” this week, with the revival of the new Naruto series, and major shounen mainstays Bleach, One Piece and Naruto all out of filler-mode. Normally such news would warrant a big yawn from me (and it would here as well if it weren’t for the fact that I have nothing else to write about). I never watched Bleach or One Piece (despite the latter being critically acclaimed… of which I don’t question, I’ve just never been motivated to watch it), and I dropped Naruto after 130-ish odd episodes during the middle of the chase for Sasuke arc, just after the series got licensed. But the decision to stop watching Naruto wasn’t driven by any moral loyalty to the western distribution of anime… I’d been growing ever tired of the repetitiveness of the series for some time and I was beginning to notice patterns I’d already seen in Dragonball Z, so the license just seemed like a convenient excuse for me to drop a series at a time in my life when I rarely, if ever, did. (Honestly, I still rarely drop series unless either the fansubbers get far behind and/or the series sucks to a point that tests even my tolerance.) As tempting as it was to swear myself off long-running shounen series, I didn’t. But it wasn’t until years later that I sat down to watch another 50+ episode shounen series in Yakitate! Japan. I wasn’t avoiding the genre, per se, (although I did go out of my way to avoid Bleach purely because of its genre), I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up another long running shounen series knowing that chances were, I’d be subjected to the same long bouts of repetitiveness, slow pace and cliches and general triteness. However, in the first twenty-ish eps of Yakitate!, I thought I was in luck. There was a freshness about the whole thing, an addictive energy that made it difficult to turn my eyes away, even if (or maybe, because) the thing was over-the-top, self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek. However, after the end of the arc at about the thirty ep mark, the series was struck down by a typical case of long-running-shounen-itis. After that experience, I really haven’t seen a reason to go back to long running shounen series since… not with the multitude of other genre pots I have my fingers in.

The problem is, not all long running shounen anime are bad. Rurouni Kenshin totally ran out of steam a season and a half from its eventual end, but at it’s peak it was a very compelling series that exemplified all that is good with the genre. Hikaru no Go (a series of the type which is parodied by Yakitate!) was a very solid shounen series almost all the way through (bar a half dozen episode filler stretch towards the end of the series). Fullmetal Alchemist certainly deserves mention as a great series as well. And there are plenty of others, Hajime no Ippo and One Piece, for example, if other people’s opinions are to be believed. But, in my personal experience, the most memorable shounen series are the ones that are actually shorter in length. My-HiME is an example of a less traditional shounen series with an almost all female cast. Akagi is one of the more underrated shounen series, but it’s impact is as great as any other in the genre, and it manages to do this in a very short amount of time when compared with its longer counterparts. Hell, one of the best shounen series I’ve seen is the first set of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure OVAs, and that was a total of 6 OVAs in length. But the fight scenes in that were incredulous… all the tension of Naruto’s best fights, but with far better animation. Hell, Read or Die is another example of a really short, but really kick ass shounen series. So, what conclusion can we draw from this list. Well, inevitably different people will have different tolerance for shounen anime. I think what I can draw for myself is that, what’s fun and exciting over a short term becomes tedious and dreary when repeated and dragged out over a long term. But, at the end of the day, that’s probably fairly obvious.