Why do I keep watching anime? More and more. All kinds of anime. Twenty years deep, I watched hundreds, thousands maybe, most of them along the same lines. Why do I keep watching basically the same tropes, and fill my life with it? Why don't I just watch something else? There's so many on my watch list that will get watched sooner or later. I don't watch movies like that, and I definitely do not watch live action series. I'm constantly watching anime. A new one got people geeked up now too. Dandadan. I started watching that too.
Comparison is the thief of joy someone said to me on an IG anime page. Really...maybe.
Dandadan is about a girl whose grandmother is a telepath, but the girl herself believes that it is a lie. That all things to do with the metaphysical world is make believe and that even aliens are fake. She meets a loner boy who is into aliens. They get themselves into a challenge and he gets cursed by a spirit in an abandoned tunnel, gaining super powers and she achieves psychokinetic awakening while being abducted by aliens in space. A couple trope boxes immediately ticked, but that's okay, originality is not why I watch anime.
Ping Pong is about two kids, Peco and Smile, who like ping pong. They are talented and wish to compete in the finals where a bald guy is reigning champ. He's supposedly a kid too. Smile is shyer than Peco, and looks up to him, someone who taught him the game of ping pong. This one ticked the trope box of at least one.
This review is about two episodes and we'll start with episode 7 of Dandadan. There might be some spoilers ahead but not crazy ones.
Episode 7 of Dandadan follows the psychic girl and the cursed boy as one of their classmates is being pursued by a spirit. One thing this anime has is good animation and cool colour choices. Despite this, all I could think about when I watched this episode was how much off a rip off this anime is.
How am I supposed to enjoy this when I thought once again about how this was like Psycho Mob, with a character who has variable psychic powers. When I think about Demon Slayer, with how Tanjuro empathises with the demons he was slaying. And Naruto, reminding me of the Obito backstory where one episode had no dialogue and only a piano played while the backstory ran. And at the same time as I thought about the other animes, I thought about how better the other ones did it.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Psycho Mob percentages were better than the random ways Momo controlled her psychic hands. Tanjiro's empathy when he used 'blessed rain after drought' was better than the tearful screams telling the cursed to boy shut up in Dandadan. Obito's backstory with the piano was better than the spirit mother in episode 7. The piano and what it displayed was so much more touching than the mother fighting the child abductors for her child. I'm watching this episode and feeling nothing but frustration and outrage. A piano melody is an easy way to sway emotions. But the best they could do was only to lead me to think of other piano loops like Obito's or Faputa's that could draw real emotions. For Dandadan it was a case of any piano loop will do rather than get the one that matches the moment.
Comparison is the thief of joy, he told me, but I don't think it is. Comparison gives you perspective.
Episode 9 of Ping Pong. Peco and Smile, the shy kid, advance in the tournament and Peco smashes one of the players that beat him earlier in the series. But Peco has an injury that threatens to end his tournament which he could do and still qualify for the national tournament, the goal of this regional tournament. Peco's next opponent however is the region's monster, the reigning champ, and he chooses to play and possibly ruin his knee. We learn more about Peco and Smile's relationship in this episode.
I woke up at 5 am and at 9pm I'm tired with my eyes twitching, but I'm watching Ping Pong with jolts of joy that I think are unimaginable. I cannot believe what I'm seeing. By the end I'm ecstatic and elated, geeking trying to go to sleep, because I have to be up at 5am again, happier than I've been for a long time.
Why do I watch anime?
The premise of this anime is nothing new. A shy kid waits for a hero to lift him out of his societal seclusion and his own self imposed restrictions. There were some revelations in this episode that I swear I never saw coming! I don't know why I didn't see it coming whereas what happens in Dandadan I can see coming from a mile away, even if both have similar premises. The way Ping Pong executed it made you forget about every trope that it takes advantage of. All Chekhov writes about are love stories, but I'll be damned if his stories don't have a line that makes reading it worthwhile. Even within a trope, even if you use commonplace storylines, you can still inject something fresh that can make it stand out, giving it a reason to exist, making it less of a trope but more like a reinvention. And this one was a stunning one.
Ping Pong has something Dandadan doesn't have. And that is writers who enjoy writing stories, stories that bloom over time. Sound designers who have an ear for and enjoy discovering and making music that match and elevate the script. Directors who know about timing and enjoy watching things play out in a way that will electrify the viewer. And all of them explorers with vision in the trope box of anime.
I was thinking about why this episode made me so happy. And why I disliked that Dandadan episode so much. Comparison is the thief of joy but it's not so much that I thought the other animes did the same thing so much better. Not better. They didn't do it better. They just put thought into what they created, whether it be human creativity or ingenuity. All that the makers of Dandadan did was use nice colours to make it look good, disrespecting large parts of anime itself, disdaining writing and music. This is the dividing line between these types of anime. Those who love anime and those who use anime. Ping Pong has creators who appreciate the art of anime and what it is capable of not even just to push the art form but at least use it to create something from their souls, for all art are just pieces of one's soul that we take out for ourselves and give to others if we choose to do so. Dandadan's creators took from other people's souls not their own, and it was so glaring in this episode that it made it soulless.
Peco sacrificed himself for Smile like the mother sacrificed herself for the daughter in Dandadan. These two animes are both a little about bullied kids. I stole again. Comparison is the thief of joy. But I don't even care if I have just seen something similar before. You don't know how happy I was to see that scene. It was so good, so well done that it made me euphoric and I swear I shed tears watching it. You would think a mother fighting to save her child from abduction would be more emotionally powerful. But no! The simple but nonchalant way of how Peco expressed himself, how the creators delivered it, the music's resonance, made it infinitely more powerful! It was not just cheap emotion for emotion's sake but an expression of triumphant human feeling!
And I pay homage to the voice actors too. There's something about Peco's voice actor that stands out and adds charm to the character in a way that you'll only see in an anime that exists only for the sake of art and not anything else and you can't say the same for Dandanan, whose main voice actor can only work with what he's given, I guess...Ping Pong as a show gives me the impression that a whole lot of talented people came together to pursue their passion. And boy did they succeed.
Episode 9 of Ping Pong. I haven't felt this way in a long time! Right after episode 7 of Dandanan really made me consider stopping anime. Never! It's times like these where I think anime is the peak form of art as a whole and no one can tell me otherwise. I'm still feeling chills like you wouldn't believe from this episode the day after.
I stopped watching Dandadan after episode 7 but I might go back and finish it and see if episode 8 is less soulless. The hype train is hard to resist. But not before I finish Ping Pong and then rewatch the whole thing again.
Ps,
The soundtrack to Ping Pong has to be top 3 of all time. So distinctive and iconic. I had this one song from it on replay while writing this, 'a hero appears', which comes on when Peco feels invincible. I feel like biting my tongue by how good it is, oh my days, how it has that invincibility feel! Perfect for that moment and not just any stock piano loop at a supposedly emotional scene like some of these animes do. I almost forgot about how important the soundtrack is for an anime by the recent animes I watched, like Dandadan and ReZero. Ping Pong reminded me of it again. But only listen to this if you've already watched the show. The script really adds to the experience. If it doesn't give you waves of euphoria then I don't know what will...