Chica Manga

Here we go with 10 anime that turn 10 this year Part 2:

(If you want to read part 1, here it is…)

Princess Jellyfish

Princess Jellyfish centers on Amamizukan, an apartment building in Tokyo, where the only tenants are otaku women, and where no men are allowed. While each character has her own particular fixation, the protagonist is Tsukimi Kurashita, whose love of jellyfish stems from memories of her deceased mother taking her to an aquarium and linking the lace-like tendrils of jellyfish to the dresses of princesses. Tsukimi hopes to become an illustrator and is an awkward girl terrified of social interaction, attractive people and the prospect of formal work.

The other tenants of Amamizukan are the same, being NEETs who refer to themselves as the “Sisterhood”. Tsukimi meets the stylish Kuranosuke Koibuchi, the illegitimate son of a politician, who cross-dresses to avoid the obligations of politics and to feel closer to his mother. Tsukimi keeps the secret of his masculinity from her man-hating housemates, even as she is troubled by the intimacy of having a man in her room at times.

Amamizukan’s neighborhood is under threat of redevelopment, as opportunists aim to turn the quaint area into a more cosmopolitan region, with many of the buildings being demolished to make room for hotels and shopping centers. Although Amamizukan’s tenants fear and loathe attractive people, they are helped by Kuranosuke who does not want to see Amamizukan destroyed.

The Secret World of Arrietty

A boy named Shō tells the audience he still remembers the week in summer he spent at his mother’s childhood home with his maternal great aunt, Sadako, and the house maid, Haru. When Shō arrives at the house on the first day, he sees a cat, Niya, trying to attack something in the bushes, but it gives up after it is attacked by a crow. Shō gets a glimpse of Arrietty, a young Borrower girl, returning to her home through an underground air vent.

At night, Arrietty’s father, Pod, takes her on her first “borrowing” mission, to get sugar and tissue paper. After obtaining a sugar cube from the kitchen, they travel inside a hollow wall to a bedroom which they enter through an intriguing dollhouse with working electric lights and kitchen utensils. However, it is Shō’s bedroom; he lies awake and sees Arrietty when she tries to take a tissue from his night table. Startled, she drops the sugar cube. Shō tries to comfort her, but Pod and Arrietty quietly leave and go home.

The next day, Shō puts the sugar cube and a little note beside the air vent where he first saw Arrietty. Pod warns Arrietty not to take it because their existence must be kept secret from humans. Nevertheless, she sneaks out to visit Shō in his bedroom. She drops the sugar cube on the floor, letting him know that she is there. Without showing herself, she tells Shō to leave her family alone and that they do not need his help, but they soon have a conversation, which is interrupted by the crow, who attacks Arrietty, but Shō saves her and Haru comes in and drives the crow away. On her return home, Arrietty is intercepted by her father. Realizing they have been detected, Pod and his wife Homily decide that they must move out. Shō learns from Sadako that some of his ancestors had noticed the presence of Borrowers in the house and had the dollhouse custom-built for them. The Borrowers had not been seen since, however.

Pod returns injured from a borrowing mission and is helped home by Spiller, a Borrower boy he met on the way. He informs them that there are other places the Borrowers could move to. While Pod is recovering, Shō removes the floorboard concealing the Borrower household and replaces their kitchen with the kitchen from the dollhouse, to show he hopes them to stay. However, the Borrowers are frightened by this and instead speed up their moving process.

After Pod recovers, he goes to explore possible new living quarters. Arrietty goes to bid farewell to Shō, but in the course of the conversation he suggests to her that the Borrowers are becoming extinct. Arrietty tells him fiercely that they will not give up so easily. Shō apologises that he has forced them to move out and reveals he has had a heart condition since birth and will have an operation in a few days. The operation does not have a good chance of success. He believes that there is nothing he can do about it, saying that eventually every living thing dies.

While Sadako is out, Haru notices the floorboards have been disturbed. She unearths the Borrowers’ house and captures Homily. Alerted by her mother’s screams, Arrietty leaves Shō in the garden and goes to investigate. Saddened by her departure, Shō returns to his room. Haru locks him in and calls a pest removal company to capture the other Borrowers alive. Arrietty comes to Shō for help; they rescue Homily and he destroys all traces of the Borrowers’ presence.

On their way out during the night, the Borrowers are spotted by the cat Niya. Sleepless, Shō goes into the garden for a stroll, and the cat leads him to the “river”, where the Borrowers are waiting for Spiller to take them further. Shō gives Arrietty a sugar cube and tells her that her courage and the Borrowers’ fight for survival have made him want to live through the operation. Arrietty gives him her hair clip as a token of remembrance. The Borrowers leave in a floating teapot with Spiller.

The Disney international dubbed version contains a final monologue, where Shō states that he never saw Arrietty again and returned to the home a year later, indicating that the operation had been successful. He is happy to hear rumors of objects disappearing in his neighbors’ homes.

The Tatami Galaxy

One autumn evening at a mysterious ramen stand behind the Shimogamo Shrine, a lonely third-year college student bumps into a man with an eggplant-shaped head who calls himself a god of matrimony. Meeting this man causes the student to reflect upon his past two years at college—two years bitterly spent trying to break up couples on campus with his only friend Ozu, a ghoulish-looking man seemingly set on making his life as miserable as possible. Resolving to make the most out of the rest of his college life, the student attempts to ask out the unsociable but kind-hearted underclassman Akashi, yet fails to follow through, prompting him to regret not living out his college life differently. As soon as this thought passes through his head, however, he is hurtled through time and space to the beginning of his years at college and given another chance to live his life.

Surreal, artistic, and mind-bending, Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei chronicles the misadventures of a young man on a journey to make friends, find love, and experience the rose-colored campus life he always dreamed of.

Trigun: Badlands Rumble

While robbing a bank in Macca City, Gasback is betrayed by his henchmen and leader Cain who plan to kill him, seize the money and retire to a life of luxury. Vash the Stampede, a humanoid gunfighter, intervenes and allows the henchmen and Cain to escape due to his strict no-kill policy. Gasback escapes using explosives, one of which destroys the city’s power plant. 20 years later, Gasback has destroyed one henchman’s property and forced him to seek refuge with Cain, who became the Mayor by using his share of money to repair the power plant. However, Cain is worried that Gasback might try to steal his huge rotating statue built in the center of the city, and insures it for 5 billion double-dollars, prompting insurance girls Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe to arrive and run risk prevention. Vash helps bounty hunter named Amelia fight off thugs harassing her aboard the sand steamer, and himself starts flirting with her. Amelia and many other bounty hunters have gathered there to capture Gasback upon his anticipated arrival and win the bounty of 300 million double dollars on his head. While in a bar, Gasback is rescued from police ambush by his new bodyguard Nicholas D. Wolfwood, a priest and assassin who was saved by Gasback while nearly dying of thirst in a desert. This resulted in a contract binding Wolfwood as the bodyguard but not an active participant in the robbery against Cain.

Vash and Amelia meet Milly and Meryl at dinner and the same night, Gasback destroys a factory owned by the second henchmen at a nearby town, forcing him to seek refuge with Cain. The word spreads the rumored attack on Macca City was a hoax, and as everyone begins to leave, Gasback arrives and fights off the hungover bounty hunters. Vash intervenes, but is distracted by Wolfwood who allows Gasback to enter Cain’s house. With his contract officially over, Wolfwood allows Vash to chase Gasback inside where Amelia learns Vash allowed Gasback to escape 20 years ago, and Cain manages to escape amidst the interruption. Vash once again allows Gasback to escape despite protests by Amelia who reveals Gasback’s escape harmed a lot of lives including her own and her mother’s. Gasback sets off a string of explosions that separate the massive bulb-shaped power plant from its cradle and it rolls through the city past dumbstruck citizens straight to the city’s main gates where a getaway vehicle secures the plant and drives away. Amelia pursues Gasback and is joined by Vash and Wolfwood. Vash tries to stop her from killing Gasback and himself gets shot by one of Gasback’s henchmen, eventually landing into dry quicksand. Wolfwood tries to save him but retrieves only his sunglasses. They take the sad news back to Milly and Meryl in the now darkened city and Amelia starts to think she’s no better than Gasback.

The next day, Amelia and Wolfwood try to take down Gasback and reclaim the plant. They’re joined by Vash, who survived because the bullet instead hit a tough piece of smoked meat in his pocket, and the insurance girls passing there nearly fell into the same pit, rescuing him. Vash then defeats Gasback in a duel with a shot to the leg and shoulder. Gasback activates a secret energy-based weapon, which is countered by Amelia using a mechanical glove Gasback recognizes as something he made for his wife, Amelia’s mother. Amelia explains she was born shortly after Gasback left her mother well-provisioned, to commit more robberies, but rival thieves came and stole everything. The neighbors and doctors didn’t save Amelia’s dying mother. However, having adopted Vash’s outlook, Amelia allows Gasback to live. Cain emerges with a gaudy missile bearing his face which Wolfwood dispatches with a single shot from his Cross Punisher. The town is restored, and the insurance girls greet Vash and Wolfwood before going off to report on the events. Gasback, Cain and others are arrested, and the police caravan is followed by Amelia. Vash discovers a newspaper page, deciding to head in a new direction. Looking at the paper, Wolfwood learns the Dodongo Brothers have escaped prison and concludes Vash has something to do with them.

Yamada’s First Time: B Gata H Kei

Yamada, first name withheld, is a 15-year-old girl who has just entered Takizawa High School. Easily considered exceptionally beautiful, she has only one problem with her own body, she thinks her vagina looks weird and is very self-conscious about it.

Upon entering high school, her dream was to have casual sex with 100 men but therein lies the problem, she believes an experienced partner will tease her about the way her vagina looks or simply the fact that she’s a virgin. She stumbles upon the solution in the form of Kosuda Takashi, a fellow virgin, whom she believes will help ease the transition to more experienced partners.

There’s only one small problem, Yamada doesn’t know anything about sex or the ancient art of seduction, meaning her quest to conquer Kosuda will be a difficult one.

So far, a small list of those anime that turn 10 this year, although it seems to us that time passes too quickly. If you realize that you have missed a title to see, it is your opportunity to add good moments to your life!