Shelf Life

Rah Rah Rahmen

Instead, these unfunny two and a half minute episodes may be the horrible future of anime. It's short, cheap to produce, streaming free online, and small enough to watch on a mobile device. The opening and ending credits take up 30 seconds of the run time.

Each episode is animated using a different CG technique and art style, but it might be more accurate to say that each episode is animated using a different crappy CG technique. Imagine a really low-budget, domestically-produced Adult Swim show. Then halve that budget, cut the running time by two thirds, and you've got Neko Rahmen.

As the title implies, Neko Rahmen is the story of a cat who runs a ramen shop. He is a real cat, and many of the jokes hinge on his feline nature. It's the unfortunate polar opposite of Pixar's Ratatouille in terms of production quality and storytelling. Ratatouille, after all, had a huge budget and featured an animal chef with talent.

The only other major character is Tanaka, a businessman who wanders into the shop at lunchtime and then returns every day, presumably out of pity. There are no other customers. The ramen tastes terrible. I assume Tanaka's fealty as a customer is unfathomable either because I'm Occidental or because it's a stab at surrealist humor that I don't get.

In one episode, the cat (Taishou) hires a senior citizen to help out in the shop. Suddenly the place is flooded with other seniors from the Senior Center who have come to see their friend at work. The cat is dismayed when his new customers demand low-salt ramen and other dietary requests. The episode ends on this gag, which annoyed me. Taishou's ramen is really crappy! This was his one chance to corner the market and sell a specialty dish to a new customer base!

Only one episode made me laugh out loud. Taishou reveals to Tanaka that he actually wanted to be a sushi chef. Taishou's cat-hair covered sushi and his uncontrollable urge to eat fish got him kicked out of the shop. Somehow, the cat hair-covered sushi struck me as hilarious. I also think the opening theme song is pretty funny, but the joke gets old after twelve episodes.

A live action version of Neko Rahmen featuring a stuffed animal version of Taishou came out on DVD last year, but I have no interest in watching it. I'd rather watch movies about delicious ramen, like Tampopo.[TOP]

This anime series, produced 14 years after Tezuka's death, is an unfortunate adaptation. Tezuka's 1970's manga has been updated slightly. For example, Black Jack's assistant Pinoko has a Nintendo DS and likes snowboarding. The core of each story remains the same.

For the unfamiliar, Black Jack is an unlicensed doctor who demands exorbitant fees from his patients. As a genius surgeon, he almost never loses a patient. His lack of a license is due to his (and by extension, Tezuka's) disgust with the Japanese Medical Association. America's current healthcare crisis makes Black Jack particularly poignant and timely to me as a reader.

Black Jack is assisted in surgery and around the house by the horrifying and befuddling Pinoko. Pinoko grew for 18 years as a partially formed conjoined twin before Black Jack built her a fake Pinocchio-like body and adopted her. Pinoko claims to be 18 and often asserts that she is Black Jack's wife, but in truth she has the mind of a six-year-old. I think Pinoko's presence is at best distracting and at worst disturbing. I'm only willing to overlook her shenanigans because Black Jack is so cool.

Tezuka's character designs are "cute" by an old-fashioned standard, and Tezuka Productions has doggedly adapted the designs. Somehow, this series adheres to a super-cute Kimba the White Lion aesthetic, which looks odd for a medically jaded story from the 1970's. A 1996 Black Jack film released in the U.S. by Manga Entertainment featured a grittier, more realistic Black Jack character design, but I think they took things too far in the opposite direction.

The four specials that precede the regular TV series in Crunchyroll's library suffer from a low budget. The TV series, on the other hand, features a pricey-looking 360 degree rotation around a 3D model of Black Jack's house on its seaside cliff. Was that really necessary? Seeing the cliff rendered in CG doesn't make it any more cool.

In the Black Jack manga, each chapter is a stand-alone story. The anime likewise consists of stand-alone stories without a series arc. In an attempt to make things more contiguous, Pinoko has a reoccurring friend in the neighborhood. A dog that appears in one of the manga chapters appears is several of the episodes I watched.

Between the stand-alone stories and the high-brow morality about the cost of human life, this series is a bit much to choke down. Pinoko's voice is even higher pitched than I thought possible, with cutesy "ch" sounds replacing "sh" sounds. Marathon-ing several episodes proved to be a bad idea. I tend to read the Black Jack manga one chapter per sitting, because reading an entire volume at once can just be weird and laughable. Insert your own joke here about taking Black Jack in small doses.[TOP]