12 Days of Anime Christmas

12 Days of anime Christmas

So for the Christmas season I’ve decide to do the 12 days of anime Christmas. For those who don’t know what it is, here’s the long and short of it. http://thecartdriver.com/12-days-of-anime-project-call-to-arms-christmas-2014/ basically for the 12 days up to Christmas, and Christmas itself, I will be making a post a day about something that has happened in the past year that is anime related. From just talking about shows I liked to specific moments and many other things. So let’s start this off with a bang for day one. 

Day one- Super Sentai

As many people know, and if you don’t listen up, there is a new season of Super Sentai every year, usually coming out around February or early January depending on the number of episodes. So this year we first said goodbye to Zyuden Sentai Kyoruger. Kyoruger was a dinosaur and samba based sentai about a group of warriors who followed the path of the dinosaur and fought a group of aliens who go around extincting life on planets.  One of the things that made the series so special was the sheer number of rangers this time around. By the end of the series, there were ten individual colors of rangers, and 14 different people in the series itself. And that’s not counting the movies, that had Deathruger and the 100 years in the future movie that introduced 6 more people to take up the mantle of their ancestors! And the large number of rangers led to some really interesting and fun characters. My favorite is still Ramirez, who I still say is a Highlander reference to Sean Connery’s character. 

                One of the biggest complaints about Kyoruger though was the focus on King, the red ranger of the season, making him the main character and even pushing aside the other characters. Personally though, I never minded it. I liked the slightly tighter focus, and felt that, while King did get the majority of the attention, everyone else definitely got their fair share. Yes, I would have loved for more Nobuharu, the blue ranger, episodes, but what we got was great. If anything, the focus on King and his character made the finally so much better. King being the last Kyoruger left, having to carry the dreams of his companions, and being powered up by their last song, made the final fight on the best of the series. 

But from the ashes of the dinosaurs rose the power of imagination and trains, and that is a strange sentence. The current and still running sentai, Ressha Sentai ToQger, follows the adventures of a group of imagination powered warriors who are trying to find there lost memories while fighting against a dark kingdom, who seek to create darkness in the world. I have to admit, so far this has been one of my favorite sentai series so far. It is just fun. It is kind of silly and they really revel in the absurdity of the show. The big twist of the series is that the rangers are not the normal teen-early twentys people that the actors are, but are in fact actually 12-13 year old kids who have been aged up artificially. They keep the strength of their childhood imagination but the bodily strengths of adults. This was an immensely huge twist, but it was very well done. Throughout the season the rangers have acted like children, but in ways that were understandable. They had imagination and a willingness to have fun and the way they would tackle any given problem was actually child-like. I especially like how the yellow ToQgers, Mio, acts around romance. Mio gets automatically frightened around anything involving love and romance, like a small child would when first confronted with that stuff. It is just very well done.

While the episode with the reveal that the ToQgers are still kids was one of the best of the season, it isn’t the only moment I want to talk about. The best moment for me so far is the introduction of the sixth ranger, Akira. Akira, the first orange ranger there has ever been (to my knowledge), has an amazing story on paper. He was a monster of the week who was inspired by a rainbow to give up his evil ways and work for the greater organization that the heroes work for. He becomes the sixth ranger for really no reason, other than that the red ranger, Right, asks him to, and that he is looking for a way to repent for his past crimes. Again, on paper this is a great story, full of pathos and redemption. What we get instead is an overdramatic nerd who doesn’t understand the real world and keeps looking for his place to die. He acts like a western hero with a hard hat. And it is amazing. Akira is one of the best moments of sentai that has happened this year.

This is only day one of what should be a 12 day journey of the big events in anime and toku this year. Expect another post tomorrow. So until then, have fun watching.