The Spring 2015 Anime Preview Guide

RIN-NE

Nick Creamer

Rating: 2.5

Like a ‘90s time capsule finally unearthed, it's a new Rumiko Takahashi production in the year of our Madokami twenty fifteen. The premise this time is a very simple one, reflective of Takahashi's style of mixing the fantastical with the mundane in oddly grounded worlds. Sakura Mamiya is an otherwise normal high school girl with the strange ability to see spirits - Rinne Rokudou is her mysterious new classmate who seems to be some kind of spirit. It turns out Rinne is actually a shinigami (or something like that), responsible for ferrying restless souls from the world of the living out on to the “Rinne no Wa,” the Ring of Reincarnation that exists in Kyoukai, a world between this one and the next. With a little help from Sakura, Rinne manages to reunite a lost spirit with his treasured track jersey, before the both of them have to fend off the attack of an only slightly intimidating human-chihuahua spirit monstrosity.

RIN-NE feels about how you'd expect for a late-era Takahashi story - tired and well-worn, but fairly confident in itself. The storytelling here doesn't really thrill or impress, but the premise seems built to make episodic adventures easy, and Takahashi certainly knows how to compose a vignette. The best element of this premier is easily the personalities of the two leads. Sakura is deadpan and matter-of-fact without having to vamp to work as the straight man - her common-sense advice (“if your phone is haunted, why not just get a new number”) and eternally unimpressed reactions (“my, what a bargain” to Rinne touting his thrifty spirit-hunting methods) make her instantly likable without overselling the part. Rinne is equally endearing, a mix of bluster, cheapness, and open-book emotions that act as a fine counterpoint to Sakura. This episode isn't exciting, and the actual jokes aren't very funny, but it establishes a perfectly comfy neutral.

The aesthetics are about what you'd expect, as well - not much animation, very occasional gag faces, largely mundane backgrounds, and Takahashi's workmanly and often same-faced character designs. Sakura even comments on how unimpressive the resolution of this episode's final battle is, but you don't need big fight scenes to justify some aesthetic personality, and RIN-NE never really goes for more than “convey the characters and action in a way the viewer can understand.” There are a couple embellishments, like their teacher's eternally star-crossed eyes and the nice background designs for Kyoukai, but overall this is a fairly bare-bones production. Less energetic than Takahashi's best work and less daring than her most renowned adaptations, RIN-NE is perfectly watchable, but not much more than that.

This series is available streaming at Crunchyroll.com.

Hope Chapman

Rating: 2

RIN-NE's story is largely phoned-in. No, I mean that literally. The majority of this episode revolves around a wrong number being perpetually dialed by a ghost. It's a mystery that only our bland everygirl protagonist and her new shinigami boyfriend with no real traits to speak of can solve, through the tepid repetition of lame jokes.

Okay, maybe I do mean phoned-in figuratively. Both are true.

If you're a really big fan of the Rumiko Takahashi formula, to the extent that you never got tired of Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha, or many of her lesser-known long-running sitcom romances, then something here might work for you. There's certainly nothing wrong with the premise: girl who glimpsed the wheel of reincarnation while wandering between worlds can now see ghosts, and partners up with half-shinigami boy who's down on his luck to calm troubled spirits, comedy and romance ensues. Okay, sure. If you really trip the wire on raucous laughter or vicarious romance or both, that's a fine foot to step out on. That's a big fat important IF, though. I'll shoot straight with you, Rumiko Takahashi's takes on these things have never really tripped my personal wire. Even when I was brand-new to anime and liked almost everything, I didn't like Takahashi's flavor of dramedy no matter how many times it was re-introduced to me, but I know what draws people to her material, and I've seen it executed with more flair than this.

This episode is so blandly executed, it feels like it's constantly begging the viewer to stop watching it. Lead girl Mamiya is introduced without even the mildest inner monologue of characterization allowed to protagonists of most mediocre anime. Lead boy Rinne is introduced with no romantic hook, and apart from "penniless" and "blunt," he's never given even a fraction of the personality traits needed to build chemistry in the most mediocre romance shows. There aren't any clever gags with sharp timing to make you laugh, just old 80s-style anime romcom standbys pasted in without enthusiasm. The color work is bland, the monster designs are flat and uninteresting, it's all just dead as the dial tone on a canceled call.

Unless you're a fan of the manga, a Takahashi diehard, or absolutely dying for a romcom in mild paste form, there's nothing to recommend here. There's certainly nothing wrong with RIN-NE, but there's definitely nothing "right" about it, either. I could rattle off at least ten shows like it with more personality and intrigue without even thinking. Have you tried Noragami yet? Kamisama Kiss maybe? The Devil is a Part-Timer is a slight stretch farther, but that one's well worth your time. RIN-NE is just too easily outclassed in its own field to recommend.

This series is available streaming at Crunchyroll.com.

Zac Bertschy

Rating: 1.5

Although she doesn't remember it, as a child, Mamiya encountered the Wheel of Reincarnation in the space between life and the afterlife, which means she can see spirits in the world. Cut to modern day anime high school, where her neighbor in class, Rinne Rokudo, hasn't shown up for school once since it began. Turns out Rinne is a shinigami wearing a haori that allows him to phase between worlds, shifting him from invisible spirit to visible human at will. It's his job to guide restless spirits back to the reincarnation wheel by helping them resolve their earthly regrets and unfinished business. When Mamiya's friend's brand-new cellphone winds up being haunted, it's up to Rinne and Mamiya to crack the case.

This episode features Rinne and Mamiya solving not one but THREE wayward ghost problems, and if they're cramming that much of the basic premise into this one episode I can't even imagine how repetitive this thing might get down the road. It's the basic modern Takahashi formula – plain girl gets magic boyfriend, they go on magic adventures and kinda-sorta maybe fall in love a little bit over the course of 8 billion episodes - although Mamiya is less of an outright short-tempered dick than her direct predecessor, Kagome. Rinne's hook is that he's perpetually broke, a gag used no less than 5 times in this episode alone, so get ready for thousands of variations on that joke. Hell, the show itself seems bored with this premise; there's a narrator who shows up to quickly explain away plot points so everything makes sense while they're skipping from story to story, like they can't get through this caffeine-free diet adventure material fast enough.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on this, I am - I'm trying to find the right words to describe how bored I was by RIN-NE, but they're not really coming to me. I was previously a fan of Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku, but Rumiko Takahashi's recent fantasy adventures always put me right to sleep – there's something about her art style that makes the yokai world seem almost depressingly bland. She illustrates these ghosts with all the visual panache of a coloring book; the designs are uninspired to an extreme. Inuyasha had this same problem. Takahashi's chief talent is drawing poofy-haired sitcom characters who make funny faces; when she applies her signature aesthetic to enormous nightmare creatures and monsters of legend, they wind up looking like poorly-realized bad guys from a forgotten children's anime circa 1972.

RIN-NE feels like a phoned-in, uncreative photocopy of Inuyasha to me. I was never a fan of that show and watching a watered-down version of it is no fun at all. This put me right to sleep. Your mileage may vary.

Theron Martin

Rating: 3 (of 5)

Review: If you have seen even a single other anime based on a Rumiko Takahashi work then there's no mistaking that she is the creative mind behind this one, too, as all of the character designs have that distinctive Takahashi look. The character of the show also has a Takahashi sensibility to it, too, though its brisk pacing and quick scene changes are almost more reminiscent of a series based on a 4-koma manga. Still, that something like this is only currently scheduled for 25 episodes is a bit surprising, as it has the feel of a new long series beginning.

The concept is very basic and straightforward: high schooler Sakura Mamiya can see spirits, and that throws her into association with Rinne Rokudo, a young man (and neighboring student in class) who claims to be a shinigami “of sorts.”  He does, indeed, possess a robe that allows him to take spirit form, which only she and other spirits can see. She winds up helping him on a few cases, including getting to the bottom of a haunted cell phone owned by one of her friends and dealing with both a Chihuahua spirit and the spirit of a teenage boy who has been trying to get Sakura's attention. This can involve going to a spirit world where the Ring of Reincarnation, which Sakura first saw as a child, exists.

And that's about it. There is little indication of complexity or depth here; this is a simple, family-friendly tale told with a somewhat goofy spirit, nor does it strike any new ground; in many senses it overlaps heavily with Noragami, for instance. Like that one, one of its gimmicks is that Rinne is desperately poor, to the point that he posts a sign by the dropbox he uses to get missions that those who leave only piddly donations will get curses instead of help. The other gimmick is that, aside from his elaborate robe (the Haori of the Underworld), the tools Rinne uses to deal with the spirits are very cheap, such as a tin-cups-and-string phone which requires coins to operate. In what is clearly going to be a running joke, each of these items comes with a sales pitch-like advertisement.

Overall, nothing about the first episode really sticks out (the technical and artistic merits are solid but nothing exceptional, too), but I have not a shred of doubt that this will be a successful series. In falling somewhere between the slapstick of an Urusei Yatsura and the more serious Inuyasha, it puts things together just right to be a lightly entertaining show.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3

When Sakura Mamiya was a little girl, she somehow wandered into the spirit realm, where she saw a large, red wheel spinning slowly in the sky. That was the Wheel of Reincarnation, or Rinne no Wa, and although she had her memory erased, from that day forward she has been able to see spirits. Flash forward to her high school years. The boy who sits next to her in class, Rinne Rokudo, hasn't come to school once since it started a month ago, so when he shows up at last and no one else can see him, her first thought is that he's a ghost. Instead he turns out to simply be wearing the Haori of the Underworld, a magical garment that can make spirits solid and people spirits depending on which side is out. Rinne's no ghost – he's a perpetually broke shinigami (sort of thing), and Sakura ends up getting pulled into his exorcisms when her friend's phone is assigned a haunted number. Let the hijinks begin.

I'm actually surprised that it took this long for Rumiko Takahashi's latest series to get an anime adaptation, but definitely pleased that the story feels like it moves better in animated form than in the manga, which can get very episodic. Manga Sakura at times feels somewhat lacking in personality, something I did not find here thanks to the added inflections of voice. More interesting, however, is that Sakura is much more laid-back than the average Takahashi heroine; by this point Akane or Kagome would have resorted to violence against the hero while Sakura just sort of takes everything in with a mildly bemused expression unless something really surprises her, like Rinne's ability to fly while wearing the Haori. This helps to balance out the wackier aspects of the episode, like a ghost with a flowerpot on his head or a ghostly chihuahua.

I am not wild about the coloring in this show, unfortunately. Not the color scheme – the pale, everyday colors of the world make Rinne's hair and Haori stand out more, which works well – but rather the manner in which the images are colored. Everything looks very flat, like someone forgot a layer on whatever program they were using to lay down color, and it can be distracting at times. The characters mostly look good, apart from one scene where the image is frozen so that the narrator can tell us about one of Rinne's spirit world items; let's just say it's definitely not a key frame they paused on. Takahashi's characters tend to adapt well to animation, and these are no exception; the ghostly chihuahua is particularly good. The colors and that one scene are really at this point the only issues in an otherwise attractive show, although from the opening theme I do have some reservations about Rinne's cat companion, who just looks creepy where he was cute in the manga.

Rinne's first episode maintains a nice balance of wackiness, a little sadness (it does involve teenage ghosts, after all), and deadpan humor along with some supernatural action. While it very well may suffer the episodic issues that have come to plague the manga, this is a fun and kind of funny introductory episode, totally devoid of fanservice or crude humor. If you're just looking for old-fashioned antics without emotional manipulation or any in-your-face qualities, you definitely should check this out.

This series is available streaming at Crunchyroll.com.