2014 was a year in which the country of Japan continued to exist, and continued to invest in the production of cartoons. Some of them were made available outside Japan, and occasionally – just occasionally – I watched some of them.

The following is a collection of nonsense words about some of those cartoons I watched. Not necessarily the best ones I watched, or even necessarily good ones, but most certainly ones I watched. Also maybe some I didn’t in passing.

Speaking of things I didn’t actually watch, keeping up the usual tradition, I’ve still not got around to watching Gundam Unicorn, though I guess I’ve now got the entire series sitting around on Blu-Ray. I also didn’t get around to watching the new episode of Code Geass:Akito the Exiled, but that’s mostly a result of it not actually existing yet.

I should probably also point out that, for the first time in years, I didn’t watch either of this last years Precure movies. I guess that’s what DokiDoki will do for you, but it did rather give me a gap in terms of things to write about this year.
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So, at todays (well, yesterdays by current Japan time) Wake Up, Girls! versus I-1 Club event, they announced that the legend that is Yutaka Yamamoto was once again donning his directors hat (or suit-and-tie, more likely) and crafting the theatrical sequel to the Wake Up, Girls! anime that the world was waiting for.

Not that the trailer that they released was much other than a long build-up to Yoppis rather radical new hair-do, although I guess they do show-off the fact that they fixed some of that concert footage from the TV show for the BDs in the process. The cynic in me (well, the one who is behind on extra-curricular WUG material, anyway) wonders if the short-cut is because people kept getting Yoppi and MayuC mixed up, but then I also wonder if that was only a problem amongst some of the folks in Western fandom that I know.
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Wake Up, Girls wrapped up on Friday. I have to admit, going into the last anime season, it was the new show I was looking forward to the most, even if the reasons for that weren’t exactly the purest (or, rather, there was a certain amount of expected Yamakan-related schadenfreude going into it).

As the show progressed, it was probably the new series (as in, not Kill la Kill or Build Fighters or any carryover from the prior season) that I followed most closely week to week, though, ultimately, it ended up being a bit of a weird kettle of fish.
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Yamakan sure did go and make the Fractale of idol cartoons.

Which isn’t to say that Wake Up, Girls is a bad show – it’s actually pretty entertaining and has a traditional 2D animated dance sequence, and at least one of those things is more than you can say about most idol anime these days, but watching the movie which begins the franchise is an experience not-unlike watching the first episode of the directors most infamous of prior works.

That is, it’s all cynical as hell, and it sure enjoys pointing it out on a regular basis.
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