A Channel & DOTSO Review

A Channel - Review

A show about the daily lives of four school girls might not seem very interesting on paper but in practice it’s moderately successful. This is because the anime focuses efficiently on the protagonists and on developing them as distinctive but not radically difference individuals. Of course this is not without flaws. Run, the resident cute airhead is borderline retarded. This is demonstrated numerous times but the clearest example is the instance in which Run nearly falls out of a three-story window whilst waving at her friend. That’s just natural selection surely? Or the time when she forgets to put on her underwear and flashes her friend, I mean how does this girl function in the real world? Evidently the creators are incapable of decipher between naïve and dumb. Another problem takes the form of not knowing who the target audience is. On the one hand the non-threatening female characters and their mini-escapades into the joys of friendship and growing up would suggest primarily young girls are the intended mark. Yet the often uncomfortable and somewhat sexualisation of their cuteness (take the underwear episode or the teacher with a crush on Run’s forehead) would suggest an older male demographic. Fortunately these are few and far between. In short if you want an enjoyable, simplistic, non-challenging anime to pass the time, A Channel delivers.

Rating: 5/10

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko – Review

With a name like Electromagnetic Wave Woman and Adolescent Man, you know this is going to be awesome right? With a premise of a young girl who is a self-proclaimed, futon-wearing alien, having been missing for half a year and later recovered floating in the sea; this isn’t going to be a chore to seat through. Well you’d be wrong on both accounts. DOTSO is just another cute-but-somehow-inept-female meets boy-void-of-personality. Rather than utilize the premise to its full potential, the anime prefers to exploit Erin’s backstory merely as a device to make her childlike and helpless, thus dependent on her male cousin. But perhaps the most insulting part is that we never learn what did happen to Erin, not even ambiguously. It’s never addressed, which renders the entire premise utterly pointless. The writers could have substituted a less outlandish backdrop – Erin was bullied at school and thus became a shut in, you could still have exactly the storylines. If fact that would make people’s reactions to her more convincing. Presumably the knowledge of her disappearance/reappearance was well known, any person with common sense would determine that the girl is suffering amnesia due to some form of trauma and take that into account before treating her like a social leper. Oh no, Erin generally fears returning to school and has trouble finding employment because people find her ‘weird’. Why? Erin wraps a futon around herself. Why? Because she is mental/emotionally traumatised! Why? Because she was missing for half a year! Or the brain-dead mother who doesn’t see fit to put her daughter in therapy, apparently she thinks Erin is going through a fad. Or maybe she is waiting for some generic male relation to come in save the day with optimism! And how does this marvellous series end? With an entire episode dedicated to a baseball game, which our hero is absent from as he has been sent on a random quest to locate the father of one of his miscellaneous friends. A filler episode! It ends on a filler episode. No, the entire series is a filler episode.

Rating: 4/10