Endings Over Openings

What's Up Ahead:
• My current favourite song, the ending theme of an anime I'm currently watching.
• Introduction of some anime series by delightfully bizarre production studios.
• A little insightful, though possibly erroneous, explanation of Japanese room-size unit of measurement.
• Foray into describing the Japanese online amateur made music scene.
• What a Vocaloid is.
• Vocaloid videos.
• Final Goal!!!


Have been lamenting my lack of musical exploration lately.

I can't properly recall the last musical discovery that set my enthusiasm leaping with delight. I have been listening to the same, limited collection of tracks stuffed into my tiny, decrepit, but still valiantly functioning iPod Nano for goodness knows how many months.

However, I have had little moments of 'oooooh, nice!' on the musical front, and most of them have been coming from the Opening and Ending themes of anime series.

(Yes, I'm still watching anime. Yes, I'm fast approaching the mid-twenty mark. Yes, I'm still escaping from reality.)

What I've been really quite in love with is the Ending theme of the Spring 2010 anime series, 'Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei' (四畳半神話大系). With the assistance of my trusty friend, Jim Breen's, online dictionary, I've rather clumsily translated the title into 'The Four-and-a-Half Tatami Mat Compendium of Myths'. Possibly messed up the order of the words, hence scrambling the meaning, but please try to overlook the translate fail.

'Four-and-a-half tatami mats', is I'm pretty sure, considered the size of a small, poor-person's room. I haven't actually looked this up, but have seen enough references to it to come to the conclusion. Japanese rooms, especially traditional ones, are measured by the number of tatami (traditional straw flooring) panels it takes to cover the floor. So sometimes on the websites of ryokan (traditional Japanese inns), they tell you how many 'jou' (the counting verb for tatami panels) large the room is. Since I've convinced myself I'm hopeless at numbers and figures, I shan't bother looking up just how large one tatami 'jou' is.
Coming back to 'Four-and-a-half', the namesless protagonist of the series lives in a boarding house of 'four-and-a-half tatami mat' rooms in Kyoto. It's produced by the studio Mad House, which sort of accounts for the delightfully bizarre and unique animation, storytelling, and atmosphere.


(Note the use of a 'four-and-a-half tatami mat' floor plan to form the character for 4!)

I could ramble on and on about the anime, despite having only seen 4 episodes so far (I believe about 8 of a total of 11 have already been aired). But will restrain myself here and bring myself back to the main purpose I had in mind when starting on this post. Music. Specifically, anime ending and opening themes.

I rather love the ending theme for 'Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei', 神様のいうとおり ('Kami-sama no iu toori' - 'Just As God Said'). It's a collaboration between three parties, whose names I'm feeling too lazy to romanise right now. It's a groovy electronic piece with deadpan-ish vocals that dwell in that territory between cutesy and airy.

AND, I have to add that I really love the ending sequence animation too!! It makes use of the 'tatami room floor plan' idea and has some rather nifty animation.

Here it is!!



Surfing around on youtube also brought me to a more electronic version of the song. This one on youtube is different from the one that came with the single, somehow! And I actually like it better! Reminds me of old-school video game sounds. Lovely.




Another anime theme that I'm rather in love with currently is the one for Bakemonogatari (化物語). The title of the series is rather neat - in Japanese, the three characters can be split into two words, 'bakemono' ('monster') and 'monogatari' ('story') by sharing the middle character, and it can be translated into English as 'Ghostory'. Pretty cool playing with language that is wonderfully translated, huh? ^^

'Bakemonogatari' was produced by the studio SHAFT, which exceeds Mad House in terms of bizarreness and creativity, I feel. 'Bakemonogatari' has very gorgeous animation, with great colours, the highlight of which are the beautiful red outlines. Also has very strange imagery and words being flashed on the screen, that I just allow to wash over me in a mind-boggling celebration of wonderful strangeness. The background music is a delight, the voice work excellent (exercising herculean self-control not to go down this tangent). I can hardly keep up with the puns and humour, even with subtitles, though, which makes me feel really quite inadequate.

Right. The ending theme. 'Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari' (The Tale That You Don't Know) by supercell. It's a very pop-ish song. I rather prefer the full lengh version to the anime ending sequence version, but am going to post the latter as I rather like the ending animation. Again. Heh.



supercell is rather interesting. It has its origins on Nico nico video, which can be called the Japanese youtube. I haven't really explored this area of the world wide web, so forgive the inaccuracies, misguided assumptions and/or statements spawned from ignorance that may result from my insufficient knowledge and web-surfing.

It seems that 'doujin music' is quite the phenomenon now. 'Doujin' is used to refer to 'amateur made' products, (the most famous example would be 'doujinshi' - 'amateur made manga'). This flourishing of the doujin music (I'm not even 100% sure if that's how they refer to it...... -.-) scene seems to be a result of two wonderful pieces of technology.

Firstly, the tool of the Vocaloid. These are singing synthesizing software. Wikipedia can probably do a better job explaining. Even an ignoramus like me couldn't help but notice the word 'vocaloid' being bandied about with great frequency in the Japanese-loving corners of the internet. And now I can name a few, like the Kagamine twins and Gackpoid, which uses the voice of legendary (to some I suppose) singer Gackt.

Anyway, so basically Vocaloids allow people to put in vocals to compositions they've created, and the whole composition and production of a song can be completely accomplished on a computer. No need to be able to play any instrument or sing, or have to enlist the assistance of people able to do so. This, as you can imagine, enables a lot more people who are talented in composition to realise their creations in audio.

The second piece of technology is the platform of NicoVid. I say it can be called the Japanese youtube, but I think it has one added feature that makes it really quite different. I think it's the function that allows viewers to comment on a specific moment in the video played. It also scrolls these comments from viewers across the video when it's being played (yes, this can be switched off, thank god!!). Can't put up a screen capture as my laptop is now running on 'Zero' disk space, but I think this function adds to a sense of, how shall I put it? Participation? Community?
A lot of the comments are just exclamatory, such as 'cute!!' or 'hot!!' or just the Japanese version of 'lol' or 'haha', 'wwwwwww' (the w looks like a smile, doesn't it? like ^w^ ).
Even though they're just simple comments, I think the commenting and viewing of comments as the video runs definitely puts in an added-dimension to the video viewing process, and that's what makes NicoVid different from youtube.

And, coming back to my point, I think this more participatory video site hosting these 'amateur made' songs does enhance the popularity of the scene.

Oh, I forgot to add that another key characteristic of 'doujin music', apart from using Vocaloids, is the accompanying animation or visuals.

Take supercell as an example. The group (or 'circle' as they're called) has one key member, Ryo, who does the composition and production of the music, and I forgot how many other members who are in charge of providing the illustrations and animation. I think there're about seven of them??

Anyway, now that we're back on the topic of supercell, what I want to comment is how it's rather impressive that a web-based amateur music composer is now signed on a major label and releasing music. They no longer use vocaloids, though. What you heard in the video above is a real flesh and blood singer. However, I read that she, too, has her roots in the online self-produced NicoVid music world.

So, now, I'm going to end my own little amateur foray into describing and dissecting doujin music with three Vocaloid videos!

This song was my initiation into the world of Vocaloids. I came to know of the song as it was covered by a couple of seiyuu (voice actors). (Yet another piece of evidence of the power of the doujin music scene! Usually, wouldn't the order of covering be the reverse?)

'Iroha Uta', composed by Gin Saku, featuring the Vocaloid Kagamine Rin.




What do you think? I took some time to get used to the electronic voice. But I think it's a good, catchy song.

Next up, 'Karakuri-shi to Ao' ('The Marionette Master and Green') by Machigerita, featuring Gackpoid and Hatsune Miku Append (which I'm assuming is another version of 'Hatsune Miku').
This one is nice and creepy.




And finally, something a little different. 'Hello Again' by mayuko. A duet by the twins Kagamine Rin and Len. Really quite lovely. If a tad too long. ^^;




So what do you think about Vocaloid singing and doujin music?
I also heard that quite a lot of these tunes are available at karaoke places as well. Not very sure about the details, but it really is quite some thing, isn't it? For amateur created products to make their way into the commercial sphere like this. Definitely something worth looking further into, but I'm not sure if I can spare the time and effort!!

Anyway, I actually planned to post more anime opening and ending sequence videos, but I think I'll leave the onslaught of youtube videos at this for now. Am getting rather tired, and I'm sure you, dear reader, are too.

Right. Last obstacle to clear!!

The ending sequence with credits removed of the anime series 'Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei' (Farewell Teacher Despair). Produced by the superbly strange SHAFT, and starring the wonderful seiyuu (voice actor) Kamiya Hiroshi, a mini-festival of whom I'm currently having. The art styles and animation forms they whisk the viewer through is even more varied and strange than that in 'Bakemonogatari'. Not going to delve too deeply, as apparently I've already spent 3 hours on this post.





There we go!!

If you managed to make it through this entire clunking descendent of Frankenstein's monster post AND watched all *counts* 7 videos, as a reward, you can claim a big Badge of Approval from me. Hahahaha.
But remember, no cheating or lying!

Haha.