anime|otaku

School Days was among the many reasons why I have rekindled the flame of anime addiction inside me. It was, however, not the only one. Among the pivotal reasons why I have appreciated anime once more was simply because of a happenstance: I was surfing through CrunchyRoll, a popular online video streaming site that caters to fans of Asian media, when I found an anime series entitled The Red Blooded Eleven. Curious, I searched the Internet for more information with regard to the series, and I found some from fansub.tv. What information I found was both funny and absurd at the same time: I saw some of the pictures that were highly suggestive, and I laughed with the absurdity of the accompanying subtitles. I am pretty sure pictures speak more than a thousand words with this series.

Saizen, a fansub group focusing on sport anime, subbed the first episode of this series. From what I have pieced together, they decided to sub the first episode of The Red Blooded Eleven as an April Fool’s joke. In their April 1 statement earlier this year, they dropped Eyeshield 21, a popular shounen sport anime about American football and replaced it instead with The Red Blooded Eleven. Since the Geass popularity was at its peak at that time (if I remember correctly), they were also perhaps meaning to fool Geass fans into believing that it was something extra from Code Geass, or a new OVA. (Elevens were the derogatory term used by Brittanians to refer to Japanese.)

I personally do not know if Saizen got a kick fooling people, or if they even fooled people, but I totally laughed at the show itself. It was a paragon of bad animation, with even its seven-year old senior Astro Boy having better animation than it, albeit in black and white. Sweat was drawn as if it were … also something secreted by men, but not by the sweat glands. The fight scenes were surrealistically absurd, and downright stupid. I believed I had seen the rock-bottom of anime when I saw The Red Blooded Eleven, and that drastically changed my perspective regarding anime. I can now even stomach series like Zaizen Jotaro or Gun-doh Musashi simply because I believe I had seen the worst, but more importantly it has lessened my standards regarding anime series as well as made me more receptive to different genres.

Anyway, do take a look at The Red Blooded Eleven. At the very least, one can enjoy its absurdity; and at the very best, one will most probably appreciate a lot more anime.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Anime, Light, Serious, The Red Blooded Eleven. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.