Forum - View topicREVIEW: Michiko & Hatchin BD+DVD
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KENZICHI
 Posts: 1118 |
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I've only watched the first 3 episodes so far and I like it enough to keep going. I like how different it is, but really, more than anything, I just want to draw a ton of fanart of Michiko and Hatchin lol. I'm sad to hear that the quality of visuals goes down towards the end, but I'll still keep going to see how it is.
And I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that Monica was Michiko! I didn't know she had such a hot voice! (Has only seen her little kid characters.) I think the voices are solid in this show. I'm enjoying the dub a whole lot (despite all the cursing). Nice review! |
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Divineking
 Posts: 1298 |
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I agree that the show is "good" not "great" though I thought the overall storyline was handled decently and the ending was done pretty well.
I also agree the show's biggest weakness was any of the romance related stuff. While making Hiroshi spoiler[a douche] did kind of help in putting Michiko's focus more on her relationship with Hatchin than with him, they could have done a better job of showing exactly why she was so attached to him to begin with since as Michiko said herself it's hard to see her falling for a guy like him. Also the less said about ep 6's "romance" the better. Definently the worst ep for the series for me. I also have to say I really enjoyed the dub. Monica Rial did a much better job as Michiko than I was expecting given how much of a miscast it seemed at first, though Akron Watson's Satoshi is the real show stealer. He was done really well. While the show doesn't totally deliver on all of it's promise it;s still a pretty fun ride and it's a decent "gateway" anime so to speak. |
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bravetailor
Posts: 817 |
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Some good point outs to some of the flaws. The budget definitely dives a little after the first couple or so episodes. I liked the show better than this review, though.
Now, about the "well it's not as good as BEBOP" thing that fans have been parroting for just about every anime for the last 15 or so years...incidentally, I rewatched Cowboy Bebop recently and I have to say...I don't think the show has aged as well as its reputation suggests. To be honest, I always thought Bebop was a tier below its rep, even when it was first coming out in the U.S. on VHS. Many episodes are slowly paced, lack sophistication, and the dialogue isn't quite as clever as it should be. It relies so heavily on its style that sometimes you're distracted from the fact that in many episodes, the characters simply twiddle their thumbs for about 15 minutes until something happens at the 3/4 mark of the episode to give it an action scene. The main Spike backstory brings absolutely nothing new to the film noir trope of the hero with a dark criminal past that it just seems tired now, if it wasn't already in 1998. Jet was sorely underdeveloped (and often overlooked by the writers), and Edward comes off as more a comic relief character than actually a substantial member of the crew. I do think the Faye episodes have aged the best, though. I think from a substance standpoint, both Champloo and Michiko and Hatchin managed to supercede Bebop's in the long run. Champloo's writing was loaded with historical and cultural references and each episode would require at least 2 pages of footnotes to really see how much was incorporated into each episode. And Michiko and Hatchin, at the very least, has an emotional heart that neither Bebop or Champloo had. Last edited by bravetailor on Wed Sep 25, 2013 12:20 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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From Cowboy Bebop to Samurai Champloo to Michiko & Hatchin, it's a succession of coolness-focused episodic action-comedy/dramas with declining returns.
I didn't dislike the romance in episode 7 because I think it was about raw attraction (and Michiko getting distracted from Hatchin) rather than anything else and the first, wordless, encounter early in the episode was quite good at that. As soon as it's revealed that spoiler[he's married] the whole thing is obviously a bad idea that will go nowhere for Michiko but it keeps going because she's bad at resisting impulse. I actually initially thought that Hatchin might be a boy in disguise (and thus of course not Michiko's daughter). The vocal performance is androgynous "young kid" and I thought the pigtails and bows were too ostentatiously feminine, not to mention it refused to show that Hatchin had the tattoo that Michiko's daughter had. Michiko seemed pretty sure, but when she first saw Hatchin in episode 1 she turned away and asked the snotty girl if she were Hatchin. It casually revealed that she did have the tattoo in a later episode though. I have another minor thing about the first episode: spoiler[Hatchin finally snaps, beats up the awful daughter of the house and runs away, imagining in her loneliness that someone would come and pick her up to help her.] There's a shot with accompanying monologue that shows this wasn't real, but was the rest of the sequence? The next we see Hatchin she's back in the house. Wouldn't she have been punished pretty severely for what she did? They locked her in a cellar something much more trivial. |
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DKL
 Posts: 1962 Location: California, USA |
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I actually really dug the fact that, maybe the dude Michiko was in love with was spoiler[a complete fraud].
It gives breath to this idea that it's okay for these types of characters to make mistakes: they're human and are strong enough to pick themselves back up again after. I always found the fact that spoiler[Hatchin goes out and has some deadbeat's kid] by the end of the series really interesting, despite the fact that they pretty much ran out of money to keep the drawings looking sharp by the last 3 episodes (the end was interesting on paper, but wow they did not save money for it... I remember Masayuki Kojima saying that you had to pace yourself as to not burn yourself out by the end (which make sense considering that Monster was like a 70+ episode series that looked absolutely stellar by the last couple of episodes)... this is one of those examples of when you get burned out by the end). Actually, there's this steady realization in the show that these men with seemingly kind demeanors might not actually be consistently kind: Satoshi occasionally seems like this okay guy who is a little crazy because he has been burned by his association with Hiroshi, but then you suddenly remember the fact that he goes around killing people on a whim (it's quite possible that Hiroshi is not this dude's only problem). It could very well be that the only relationships that really mattered in the end were the ones that the girls formed with one another (my heart kinda broke during that episode where Atsuko and Michiko spoiler[have a falling out... they've been through all this crap together, yet Michiko still stubbornly chooses the man over her]). The infidelity episode blew my mind because there's pretty much nothing like it that I've seen in anime. Anime has this tendency to hold romance up to some clean ideal, but this episode is pretty much blows it out of the water: sometimes, you get involved with something that seemed pretty cool at first, but then it's actually kinda fraudulent... and at worst, you're forced to keep it due to appearances. Michiko was attracted to this man (like it or not, dude is clearly a smooth operator), but it was probably not a good idea. If the romance in the show seems awful, it's because it's not tidying up the idea that romance is sometimes only superficial at best (so... yeah, it is kinda awful, but this isn't a bad thing as there's an actual point to it). Anyway, really like the show for its culture and lack of emotional romanticism (unlike the fights friends get into in Shinichiro Watanabe shows, there's this unique rawness that Sayo Yamamoto brings where it honestly feels like the friendship is teetering at the brink of destruction a lot of the time). I really didn't like how they just ran out of money by the end. Funnily, it felt like they didn't have enough money to spread around for Shuko Murase's episode... you usually see inconsistency between episodes, not in the same episode under a director who I assume held a certain amount of clout at Manglobe at the time... loved the old assassin dude though: chose the good-looking person over the actual objective, but this lead to a decline in the quality of his work (a consistently destructive pattern of all the characters in the show). EDIT: Oh and the dub was really godlike. I liked it a lot. Last edited by DKL on Wed Sep 25, 2013 12:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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bravetailor
Posts: 817 |
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I always thought episode 7 was just a comedy episode. It was supposed to be a wink and nod to Telemundo-style soap operas and that Feliciano TV series that cameos throughout the show. Maybe it could have tipped its hand a bit more, but if you took it as a straight episode, you would have found it odd. It was supposed to be offbeat, I think. If you were wincing at the melodramatic speeches in episode 7, perhaps you might have missed that they often ran the "TV soap opera" music in these scenes--then you would have realized that it was actually a comedy episode.
Last edited by bravetailor on Wed Sep 25, 2013 12:14 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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DKL
Posts: 1962 Location: California, USA |
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I liked the running joke "Feliciano is about to do so and so woman this week". Thing is a god damn circus, yet people are so invested in it... has eerie parallels with what actually happens in the show.
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bravetailor
Posts: 817 |
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Haha, yeah. Another funny thing is that Feliciano the actor is built up to a blowhard narcissist...and he is...but he also turns out to be one of the more decent men Michiko and Hatchin bump into during the series. The interesting thing about this show is that the people who are built up to be these amazing people are often subverted and turn out to be not so good, and the people who are built up to be bad usually turn out to have more redeeming qualities than the idealized characters. It's hard to say that we're supposed to "like" Satoshi, but by the end you at least respected him for being a relatively straight shooter in a show full of frauds and disappointments. And unlike Hiroshi, he wasn't a coward either. To be honest, Satoshi may well have been the most tragic character of the show. He never really had any real friends except for Hiroshi, and when he was hanging with Hatchin near the end, it seemed like he was trying to be loyal to that relationship with Hiroshi by sticking his neck out for Hatchin.
Not sure if you're a guy or girl, but I can tell you, a lot of times even the smartest, toughest women can fall for what appears to be a clear fraud. I've seen it happen time after time. Sometimes guys can see a snake for what he is at first glance, but women won't. I'm sure you've known guys who pull out the most OBVIOUS, eye-rollingly cheap tricks in the book to charm women, and you don't get why he's succeeding with it. On the other hand, that same is true for the reverse. Smart guys can fall for the biggest...dogs...and other women can see that and don't get how that happens. When sex is involved, sometimes we'd rather be hopeful than be cynical about them--otherwise we'd never meet anyone. And Michiko is far from a cynic, so I can definitely see her giving people the benefit of the doubt at first glance, as tough as she is. So it does seem true to life to me. Also, Sayo Yamamoto mentioned that she came up with the show idea after breaking up with her boyfriend and going on a "girl's trip" to Brazil. So she must have been drawing on some sort of personal experience here. |
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YotaruVegeta
 Posts: 1061 Location: New York |
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No, I pretty much love this show. The ending didn't work for me too well, but in total, it was stupendous.
Also, this point does not sit right with me: "male characters are either psychopaths or useless deadbeats;" Nope, that's absolutely incorrect. That needs to be changed. |
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Echo_City
Posts: 1236 |
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I thought that the comparison to Bebop was rather uninspired as Hatchin is levels above that show: Hatchin has continuity between the episodes as well as a defined, series-length objective from Episode 1. Bebop had neither. Bebop also lacked the nuanced relationship between the two main leads. I have to agree with bravetailor when he says that Bebop's "goodness" has been blown out of proportion.
The closer comparison would be to Samurai Champloo but [b]Hatchin[/u] unfortunately falls far short of that series; if you took Jin out of that series and cut Mugen & Fuu down to about 75% of what they were (and changed the setting to a funky hybrid of Brazil + Japan) then you'd end up with Hatchin. The single worst thing about Hatchin was the last episode. The last episode of this is completely superfluous (as the previous ep was the actual ending) and it is rife with character-destroying, show-killing malice towards men that seems shoe-horned in. If you haven't seen it already, it's probably better to skip that one. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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Why is strong continuity inherently superior? Bebop's episodic nature is clearly deliberate and lets it do a lot of very different things from episode to episode. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8501 Location: Penguinopolis |
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The delusion is strong in this one. No nuance relationship between the Bebop crew? Were we watching the same show? "Defined series length objective" works when your show is about one thing. CB is about the lives of bounty hunters, they live an episodic existence by trade. Stop trying to inflate your lackluster modern anime to CB proportions. |
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bravetailor
Posts: 817 |
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I saw the ending coming from a while away, so I didn't find it surprising or really disappointing. They dropped enough clues that Hiroshi was, at best, a coward and at worst, a womanizer.
I do think that since the show is more about "girls sticking together" it does sort of become misandrist a little by default. But if either Hatchin or Michiko ended up with a guy at the end, I'd have been even more disappointed, because the show was very clearly about the unbeatable bond between Michiko and Hatchin no matter how crappy their lives go. Whether you agree or disagree with that thematic stance doesn't matter--it's the show's theme and it has to be consistent to it. |
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YotaruVegeta
Posts: 1061 Location: New York |
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Sometimes you kinda want a tidy ending to what you've been watching. It wasn't guaranteed by this show, but it was a little more plain and odd than I imagined.
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Thatguy3331
 Posts: 1799 |
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I only saw one episode of the show (and do indeed wish to continue) however I was curious about how the series was in general since I had never once heard of it from anybody until recently considering the staff behind it.
I can't speak any further on the show, and I sure as hell can't say I fully understand what makes CB on 'god level' (I myself thought it was a great show, one of my favorites, but not perfect by any means*I do however get something new from it via each re-watch.) but I'll take the Carl's word for it and continue streaming it first before I decide to buy it. |
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