Clamp School Detectives
Oct. 24th, 2012 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
type_wildThe first anime I ever saw was probably something eighties shoujo on Swedish television - because it WAS in Swedish and it was only by the time I got into anime ten years later that I could recognise the style of a faint childhood memory that I never forgot.
But the first anime I was conscious of as anime was Pokémon. And Clamp School Detectives debuted a month later. So there's your nostalgia factor: late nineties children's anime, with all the animation conventions and trends of that once upon a time. Speed lines! Funky watercolour backgrounds! Kappei Yamaguchi! They don't make them like that any longer.
For all that, I still believe that Clamp School Detectives is mostly interesting to people who are sufficiently interested in the Clamp universe to have read the original manga - and Man of Many Faces, and Duklyon Clamp School Defenders. It shouldn't surprise anyone that neither of the three series in any way are to be recommended on their own; I honestly do believe that the only reason they'd interest someone today is that the characters show up in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. The Clamp School Detectives even show up more than once and play bigger parts than, say, the girls from Magic Knight Rayearth or Angelic Layer, so I think that there might have been a degree of fondness for them on Clamp's part. So if you want to fully appreciate Tsubasa, I... would reccomend that you read the three manga of which the anime Clamp School Detectives is made. It'll save you the time and maybe the money.
But what is it, then, this ancient story? It's a twenty-six episode anime that is based on the universe established in Many of Many Faces, Clamp School Detectives and Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders in a total of seven books of manga before Clamp moved on to Tokyo Babylon and X. Subaru Sumeragi attends Clamp School and it has some part in the plot of X, without that being in any way relevant to the first three series. (Except for a truly horrifying moment in the anime where Nokoru is told to envision his future out of a view of the setting sun and HE SEES TOKYO TOWER oh god I almost screamed)
The Clamp School is very much like the Horitsuba Gakuen, only self-reliant. Here, too, is a school complex of some 10 000 people spanning kindergarten to post-grad education. Here, too, is a female headmaster who might have somewhat of a thing for messing with people's heads (if far less so than Yuko). Here, too, the festivities and celebrations outnumber the normal education, but the Clamp School has the explisit mission of fostering the most talented youths of the nation. So where Horitsuba is filled up with people who are just people, the Clamp School is filled up with child geniuses. Horitsuba Gakuen has kooky teachers and way too much cooking. Clamp School has ten year olds who pilot blimps and airplanes, do hanggliding, freediving, defeat the yakuza bare-handed, dismantle bombs - and then the cooking. Which they teach university students and set up plays about.
Our main characters are the grade school student council, made up of Nokoru Imonoyama (headhunted by NASA, uses his brain to skip work), Suoh Takamura (heir to Japan's oldest ninja clan or something, black belt in facepalm) and Akira Iyujin (master chef by day, gentleman thief by night, believes in Santa). Together, they might or might not run the entire school judging by the mansion that make up their headquarters and the amount of paper that amasses there. But because Nokoru is a "feminist", they are also on a mission to help every lady in need. It is when they help ladies that they function as the titular detectives. Somewhere on the internet, there's a crossover fanfic in which they meet with the Ouran High School Host Club (no really, I've read it).
It isn't a detective story, it's a solving the everyday problems of school story. It's been five years since I watched Cardcaptor Sakura in all its animated glory, but that is where my mind went with Clamp School Detectives: the CCS fillers. The CCS fillers might have had some kind of plot relevance that I don't remember, but listen: The Mystical Museum. The enemy in the clock tower. The crossdressing girls. The anguished process of learning to cook. The Tokyo Tower final battle - okay, maybe not really "filler" in CCS, you get the point. It's bubbly and never too serious, in a world where almost every person is essentially good and where it's usually just a misunderstanding that caused problems. Obviously, Cardcaptor Sakura has something that the Clamp School Detectives do not, as her fame has lasted while they have long since disappeared into obscurity and curiosa. Sakura has pathos: dead parents, ancient conspiracies, long-running subplots of unrequited love, lesbians. The Clamp School Detectives have cases such as the pain of loving a man who bakes better than you, the best friend of the day moving overseas, and "I never met my dad - oh well! At least Santa comes around every year." Sakura, moreover, has plot. The Detectives are episodic until the last quarter of the series introduces something of a villain.
Arguments in its favour: If you're into Clamp then you should probably watch this because not only do you get to see the detectives being adorable, Miyuki-chan shows up with real speaking parts in a couple of episodes and more importantly, so does Duklyon. I won't even lie about this: 70% of the moments where this anime had my entire attention, Duklyon was on the screen.
The remaining 30% was the moments where we got to see Nokoru being afraid for something that mattered.
But there's one thing about this anime that is so very, very wrong. That is the words "five years old" and how half the sexual abuse on children is commited by other children.
Fine, it's Clamp, we know now what they did with Tsubasa and hey, it could've been the manga version of Cardcaptor Sakura which is even more horrifying on the issue of age difference and potential power imbalance in relationships. But in CCS, they did at least have the sense to know that this is all kinds of NOT OKAY and made some attempts to justify it by telling us again and again how "mature" this third grader is. In Clamp School Detectives, these kindergarteners are just introduced as the love interests of boys ten and eleven years respectively with no-one finding that even a little bit weird. Were Clamp never children themselves? When I was in first grade, even third graders seemed impossibly old and mature. Fifth graders were almost like grown-ups. I don't care how precocious these children supposedly are: an eleven year old dating is weird but quasi-believable as some imitation of adults. An eleven year old dating a five year old is just flat out skeevy. Where are the parents? What the hell kind of schooling did that doctor have? My only comfort is how obviously uncomfortable Suoh is with his feelings for Nagisa. As the only sane person on board, it makes sense that he'd be the one to know how gigantically wrong it is for his best friend to be cheering him on in a relationship with a girl who possibly hasn't learned to write her own name yet.
Utako is as assertive as always, though, and the thing with her and Akira bothers me a lot less. It bothers me that I can't put my finger on exactly why, but here is my best guess: Utako is thoroughly established with personality, ambition and the endless wisdom of a Clamp kindergartener, none of which Nagisa is ever given. And Akira being Akira, Utako might well be the one with the best idea about pretty much everything going on. Utako and Akira have the entire story in Man of Many Faces to back them up. Nagisa is about 600% more present in the anime compared to the manga, and in addition to the existing modes "mysteriously playing the flute in windswept kimono" and "shyly gazing at Suoh", the anime adds "watching Suoh anxiously" and "asking questions of Nokoru". The anime does preciously little to expand the manga characterisation of anyone, fine, but if you're going to make a character be as present as Nagisa becomes in the anime, then you should do something to establish her as a person rather than a sounding board. But my main problem with her is her age. She'd still be boring as hell if she was Suoh's age, but at least she wouldn't give me the jeebies.
Other things that might be of relevance:
- The dub is so-so. The main characters are brilliant in English, but a a few too many of the others are not. Utako most grievously among them.
- The anime rarely goes places where the manga hadn't already gone - although a good numbers of the mysteries are new ones, there's nothing new revealed about the characters, nothing new about the friendships between them, nothing more said about their dreams and ambitions. In the perfect world, Clamp School Detectives The Anime would have made something more than an omake about Twenty Faces and Akira's double role. It would have done something with Duklyon and their mission and their (very absent) commander. There would have been... I don't know, running jokes at least about how these three separate stories cross paths. Twenty Faces would have appeared in more than one episode. There would be a reason for Duklyon being there.
Summary: It's cute but it's nineties children's anime and there's nothing remarkable to it except that the main characters show up in a certain later Clamp manga. Cardcaptor Sakura does the same thing and does it better. Bonus ew: Clamp's disturbing philosophies on love.
BUT TRY TO TELL ME THAT YOU CAN RESIST THIS OPENING THEME. BECAUSE THIS IS THE CLAMP SCHOOL DETECTIVES, ALL 26 EPISODES OF IT, IN A NUTSHELL.
But the first anime I was conscious of as anime was Pokémon. And Clamp School Detectives debuted a month later. So there's your nostalgia factor: late nineties children's anime, with all the animation conventions and trends of that once upon a time. Speed lines! Funky watercolour backgrounds! Kappei Yamaguchi! They don't make them like that any longer.
For all that, I still believe that Clamp School Detectives is mostly interesting to people who are sufficiently interested in the Clamp universe to have read the original manga - and Man of Many Faces, and Duklyon Clamp School Defenders. It shouldn't surprise anyone that neither of the three series in any way are to be recommended on their own; I honestly do believe that the only reason they'd interest someone today is that the characters show up in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. The Clamp School Detectives even show up more than once and play bigger parts than, say, the girls from Magic Knight Rayearth or Angelic Layer, so I think that there might have been a degree of fondness for them on Clamp's part. So if you want to fully appreciate Tsubasa, I... would reccomend that you read the three manga of which the anime Clamp School Detectives is made. It'll save you the time and maybe the money.
But what is it, then, this ancient story? It's a twenty-six episode anime that is based on the universe established in Many of Many Faces, Clamp School Detectives and Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders in a total of seven books of manga before Clamp moved on to Tokyo Babylon and X. Subaru Sumeragi attends Clamp School and it has some part in the plot of X, without that being in any way relevant to the first three series. (Except for a truly horrifying moment in the anime where Nokoru is told to envision his future out of a view of the setting sun and HE SEES TOKYO TOWER oh god I almost screamed)
The Clamp School is very much like the Horitsuba Gakuen, only self-reliant. Here, too, is a school complex of some 10 000 people spanning kindergarten to post-grad education. Here, too, is a female headmaster who might have somewhat of a thing for messing with people's heads (if far less so than Yuko). Here, too, the festivities and celebrations outnumber the normal education, but the Clamp School has the explisit mission of fostering the most talented youths of the nation. So where Horitsuba is filled up with people who are just people, the Clamp School is filled up with child geniuses. Horitsuba Gakuen has kooky teachers and way too much cooking. Clamp School has ten year olds who pilot blimps and airplanes, do hanggliding, freediving, defeat the yakuza bare-handed, dismantle bombs - and then the cooking. Which they teach university students and set up plays about.
Our main characters are the grade school student council, made up of Nokoru Imonoyama (headhunted by NASA, uses his brain to skip work), Suoh Takamura (heir to Japan's oldest ninja clan or something, black belt in facepalm) and Akira Iyujin (master chef by day, gentleman thief by night, believes in Santa). Together, they might or might not run the entire school judging by the mansion that make up their headquarters and the amount of paper that amasses there. But because Nokoru is a "feminist", they are also on a mission to help every lady in need. It is when they help ladies that they function as the titular detectives. Somewhere on the internet, there's a crossover fanfic in which they meet with the Ouran High School Host Club (no really, I've read it).
It isn't a detective story, it's a solving the everyday problems of school story. It's been five years since I watched Cardcaptor Sakura in all its animated glory, but that is where my mind went with Clamp School Detectives: the CCS fillers. The CCS fillers might have had some kind of plot relevance that I don't remember, but listen: The Mystical Museum. The enemy in the clock tower. The crossdressing girls. The anguished process of learning to cook. The Tokyo Tower final battle - okay, maybe not really "filler" in CCS, you get the point. It's bubbly and never too serious, in a world where almost every person is essentially good and where it's usually just a misunderstanding that caused problems. Obviously, Cardcaptor Sakura has something that the Clamp School Detectives do not, as her fame has lasted while they have long since disappeared into obscurity and curiosa. Sakura has pathos: dead parents, ancient conspiracies, long-running subplots of unrequited love, lesbians. The Clamp School Detectives have cases such as the pain of loving a man who bakes better than you, the best friend of the day moving overseas, and "I never met my dad - oh well! At least Santa comes around every year." Sakura, moreover, has plot. The Detectives are episodic until the last quarter of the series introduces something of a villain.
Arguments in its favour: If you're into Clamp then you should probably watch this because not only do you get to see the detectives being adorable, Miyuki-chan shows up with real speaking parts in a couple of episodes and more importantly, so does Duklyon. I won't even lie about this: 70% of the moments where this anime had my entire attention, Duklyon was on the screen.
The remaining 30% was the moments where we got to see Nokoru being afraid for something that mattered.
But there's one thing about this anime that is so very, very wrong. That is the words "five years old" and how half the sexual abuse on children is commited by other children.
Fine, it's Clamp, we know now what they did with Tsubasa and hey, it could've been the manga version of Cardcaptor Sakura which is even more horrifying on the issue of age difference and potential power imbalance in relationships. But in CCS, they did at least have the sense to know that this is all kinds of NOT OKAY and made some attempts to justify it by telling us again and again how "mature" this third grader is. In Clamp School Detectives, these kindergarteners are just introduced as the love interests of boys ten and eleven years respectively with no-one finding that even a little bit weird. Were Clamp never children themselves? When I was in first grade, even third graders seemed impossibly old and mature. Fifth graders were almost like grown-ups. I don't care how precocious these children supposedly are: an eleven year old dating is weird but quasi-believable as some imitation of adults. An eleven year old dating a five year old is just flat out skeevy. Where are the parents? What the hell kind of schooling did that doctor have? My only comfort is how obviously uncomfortable Suoh is with his feelings for Nagisa. As the only sane person on board, it makes sense that he'd be the one to know how gigantically wrong it is for his best friend to be cheering him on in a relationship with a girl who possibly hasn't learned to write her own name yet.
Utako is as assertive as always, though, and the thing with her and Akira bothers me a lot less. It bothers me that I can't put my finger on exactly why, but here is my best guess: Utako is thoroughly established with personality, ambition and the endless wisdom of a Clamp kindergartener, none of which Nagisa is ever given. And Akira being Akira, Utako might well be the one with the best idea about pretty much everything going on. Utako and Akira have the entire story in Man of Many Faces to back them up. Nagisa is about 600% more present in the anime compared to the manga, and in addition to the existing modes "mysteriously playing the flute in windswept kimono" and "shyly gazing at Suoh", the anime adds "watching Suoh anxiously" and "asking questions of Nokoru". The anime does preciously little to expand the manga characterisation of anyone, fine, but if you're going to make a character be as present as Nagisa becomes in the anime, then you should do something to establish her as a person rather than a sounding board. But my main problem with her is her age. She'd still be boring as hell if she was Suoh's age, but at least she wouldn't give me the jeebies.
Other things that might be of relevance:
- The dub is so-so. The main characters are brilliant in English, but a a few too many of the others are not. Utako most grievously among them.
- The anime rarely goes places where the manga hadn't already gone - although a good numbers of the mysteries are new ones, there's nothing new revealed about the characters, nothing new about the friendships between them, nothing more said about their dreams and ambitions. In the perfect world, Clamp School Detectives The Anime would have made something more than an omake about Twenty Faces and Akira's double role. It would have done something with Duklyon and their mission and their (very absent) commander. There would have been... I don't know, running jokes at least about how these three separate stories cross paths. Twenty Faces would have appeared in more than one episode. There would be a reason for Duklyon being there.
Summary: It's cute but it's nineties children's anime and there's nothing remarkable to it except that the main characters show up in a certain later Clamp manga. Cardcaptor Sakura does the same thing and does it better. Bonus ew: Clamp's disturbing philosophies on love.
BUT TRY TO TELL ME THAT YOU CAN RESIST THIS OPENING THEME. BECAUSE THIS IS THE CLAMP SCHOOL DETECTIVES, ALL 26 EPISODES OF IT, IN A NUTSHELL.
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