Anime: Michiko to Hacchin

The plot is inconsistent, like there was a subplot where Hatchin was chasing after a thief who took her shoes in episode 3 but by midway episode 4, that subplot is completely thrown out the window. Though, the main plot is a buddy road trip show about two young girls who clash a lot, the writer did put a fresh twist on it but it ended up being executed pathetically.

Michiko and Hatchin’s relationship is cliched, starting off not really liking each other but then growing to genuinely care for each other. None of the characters are particularly likeable, Michiko, while a refreshingly cool, badass black lady is really hot-headed, immature, and irresponsible and Hatchin is aloof, dense, and bratty. They tend to fight a lot like young sisters, though that’s toned down by the middle of the series. The characters are overall, mediocre.

The only redeeming values are some of the comedy in it (though there are some corny ones). The music has a more latin/brazilian vibe to it, some of it is jazzy but it’s nevertheless catchy. The voice actors did a fairly good job bringing fresh life to their characters (I watched the english dub) though the only downside is Hatchin sounds a little too whiny but it’s not too big of a problem since she has a whiny, emotional personality. But she does sound like a 10-year-old instead of an adult trying to sound like one. And the charmingly beautiful art and animation.

Good quality production values, fairly decent animation, fresh voice acting, and groovy music is wasted on a poor script. Too bad Watanabe is only part of the music department in this anime. If he had a more major staff role, this anime probably would’ve been a lot charming. I can see why this anime was never that popular: It’s too forgettable to be recommended. If you want something better by Watanabe, go check out Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, they are much more memorable with a more creative story, clever jokes, and likeable, realistic characters.

Review
As a brazilian, watching Michiko to Hacthin left me with two very distinct impressions. First off, it was a charming show, presenting a harsh reality in a light way, filled with emotional parts, covered by some comical scenes and ultimately trying to be an action show from time to time. Second, the show is set in "Brazil" and it is a true rollercoaster about it. Sometimes being right on the spot to promote my country but at other times being so completely innacurate that it enraged me in such a way I would consider dropping it.

The tale itself is about Hatchin, an orphan adopted by a crazy and lazy family who only wants money. Her life of submission and bullying ends when a mad woman and runaway, Michiko Malandro (what a name... Michiko Dude, Michiko Scoundrel, Michiko Rascal...), takes her to a crazy journey to search for her biological father.

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1. The tale is more than that
   Michiko to Hatchin slowly grows from a nearly comical start to a far more complex tale surrounding criminal factions, old friends, and intricate relationships. The constant search for Hatchin's father is intertwined with a game of cat and rat against the police, mafia, and random thugs, all constributing to a decent pace of rushing and urgency that is only broken by a few ridiculous "romantic" episodes. This is like a Cowboy Bebop with samba at many points, meaning those constant fleeing, meetings, and goings are all quite random at most and only truly get together for a few key episodes and a final run of a few episodes.
   
   The quality also helps
   Studio Manglobe, the guys behind the great works of Ergo Proxy and Samurai Shamploo, once again delivers a stunning presentation, brimming with style, fluid animation, and an uniqueness that does a great service to the industry overall. The sound direction also helps a lot, truly catching a classic brazilian vibe with mixes of samba and bossa nova. Michiko's voice may end up being annoying in a different way than your typical girly voice, but it also greatly contributes to develop her character.
   
   Light tale presentation
   As I mentioned, although Michiko to Hatchin's tale is about a harsh reality of mafia and criminal sindicates, its presentation is absurdly light. It does have a few serious shots, the characters can get quite dirty and sexual, but there is a severe lack of true criminal activity in it. The bandits rarely kill, Michiko is saved by the script far more than necessary, Hatchin also never suffers from her terribly stupid choices, and so on. The main cast is protected by the script in such way you will hardly feel any danger when they do a pole dance in front of a horde of angry thugs who have no reason to keep them alive.
   
   But this Brazil...
   Well... most of the scenes are spot on. The artistic job here truly outdone themselves to present old-school representations of brazilian cities. The charming rustic style mixed with an arid atmosphere of the country's northeast and central regions, the jungle villages of Amazon, the bustling city of the southeast region, etc. Even the portuguese is mostly spot on for the signs, music, and everything else.
   
   There are, however, a lot of problems in the show.
   
   - Brazil is huge: I mean, REALLY huge. A single small state here is nearly the size of the entire Japan, so it may a bit hard for them to understand how illogical the characters move from jungle to shrublands then to beaches and then to bustling cities in the matter of hours. It is as if the person was on US East Coast in one afternoon and the next day they are in West Coast. By bike.
   
   - Brazil is NOT Mexico, Peru, or Venezuela: There is NO FUKN AZTEC ruins in Brazil. Our native people were NOT part of these civilizations, they have their own culture, small, closed, and they never built these pyramids and temples.
   
   - Brazil is NOT Spain: We DO NOT HAVE SPANISH BULLFIGHTS here. This happens in Spain, for god's sake. People in the countryside are much more similar to north americans, with rodeos, 8 seconds, jockeys, and other stuff like that.
   
   - Brazil does NOT SPEAK SPANISH. It's not "San", it is "São". This is PORTUGUESE, not spanish. I can't understand how they can write "Malandro" okay and just make such mistakes with "São".
   
   - What hell is a single city closed by officers requesting passports? Seriously. This looks like a dictatorship stuff at extreme levels. We do have a large divergence between poor and rich, but we have a group of united states here, if you are a brazilian you can just go wherever you want in the country and you don't have to give a shit about passport. You just shove your id to the police and say: "I'm brazilian and this is my country, I go where I want". Seriously, these "attempts" to show Brazil as if run by closed military groups just annoys me. The US-aided dictatorship we suffered ended by 1985. Learn your history writers.
   

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Comments
Anyway, despite some annoying, but unfortunately common, mistakes at portrating Brazil, Michiko to Hatchin is an entertaining experience in a mix of Samurai Champloo with Cazador de La Bruja. Its variation of action, drama, and adventure can get your attention most of the time, and the artistic work here, as well as the uniqueness to it, is simply superb.

The unecessary protection to the cast conflicts with their charming personalities, and by the end you may either end up accepting this is a light tale and enjoying its comical and dramatic moments or just may end up angry and cursing when the villains just let the characters run away for no damn reason (which is typically my case).

Those looking for something different are certain to be pleased here. There is very little in the industry similar to Michiko to Hatchin. If you want a visual experience, this is also the show for you. If you expect a true mafia show or if you are a brazilian... well, you may get annoying at many points, but still can extract some joy from this minor jewel.

I came to view MtH as a weird combo of Black Lagoon meets Cinderella … in BRAZIL ! It has a hot MILF with guns and a cute loli… without them. It has great animation, gun-hos, immoral and dirty characters, an exotic setting, a somewhat coming-of-age story, a family bonds flavour between shootouts, and lots of flashy car chases. What can go wrong?

… Um... well… it’s not like it did anything wrong. Simply said, there wasn’t enough material to keep you interested for a full season worth of duration and the chemistry between characters and the magic of the setting were not that complicating to get used to and eventually get bored of. This is relevant of course as some people get bored a lot harder than others. To me, this ranks amongst the better in the field; probably third after the “let’s talk philosophically about how immoral the world is before we start shooting at everything” Black Lagoon, and the “let’s have good personal drama for a change before we start shooting at everything” Requiem for the Phantom. All the rest of its brood are monotonous and apathetic (screw you Bee Train!), and the gloomy setting is just too depressing to care following it through after awhile. MtH does a better job; it is mostly light-hearted, balances the dark with the exotic, has perky characters, has humour, and has some interesting battle sequences. These helped me not to get bored right away… five whole episodes that it.

Beyond the flashy exterior, this is still a mostly guilty pleasure series, with shallow conflicts, unrealistic battles, and convenient plot armours. As long as you can suspend your disbelief, all that can actually work on its favour, but as I said it still has very little going for it in terms of context. Here, lets me tell you what it’s all about in a nutshell: “Well, duh, there is Brazil and, duh, some MILF gets out of prison and goes to take her daughter and, duh, they are being chased around by police and, um, they shoot stuff”. There you go, not exactly a mind-boggling plot, is it now? Any attempt to be dramatic or serious is replaced fast with good old fashioned shootouts and the grammar/pronunciation of the native language is problematic as usual.

On the other hand it’s not like the characters are flat as pancakes or something. You actually see how they somewhat develop and the finale of the show is actually quite bittersweet and better than 99% of anime endings. It feels logical in a way, not far-fetched or fake. The thing is, as I said you will most likely lose interest along the way because of the loose and simplistic plot. In all honesty, this show did not deserve a full season with the context it had.

Anyways, it is not a bad anime if your expectations are not too high. It is rather different than the norm, has good production values, interesting characters, and it’s not a ridiculous Brazilian soap opera (although it moves in the same speed). It has otherwise a low replay value since its context is way too simplistic to offer you anything more with a second watch, and the duration will be painfully boring if you know what will happen later on.

After finally having watched the ending of this series i just felt the urge to write a review about this anime. Its style reminded me of Cowboy Bebop sooo much (although its so different).
My vote may look a bit overrated on the first view but let me try to explain in this review why i've chosen this high rating.


Animation: Mitchiko to Hatchin's animation is one of many strong points of this series. For a series that is set in South America(some weird Brazil) the animators made the wise decision to pick many natural colors for the landscapes and vegetation.

Many different shades of green and brown were used to create landscapes and cities that almost look cliché in a very beautiful way. Especially the houses and vehicles have a lot of detail (signs of decay, mold, bullet holes, dust and dirt) and look like they are paintings out of a discovery channel show about a bad neighborhood. The result is an atmosphere out of an 70's thriller playing in South America.

The character design is almost flawless. They dont really look like eye candy (unless the creators intended them to) but that would likely ruin the show, anyways.
With that great "ghetto style" animation, the creator chose a more sordid/dirty look. Especially the extras usually have eyes with low detail. Besides that, the main characters look awesome and the razor-sharp eyes of Mitchiko are a nice contrast to Hana's round harmless looking eyes.

The characters movements are fluid and look natural and even the background characters have the same level of detail as the main ones.

The characters emotions shown by their facial expressions are almost always superb, even for the extras. I had a great time watching Mitchiko and Hatchin interact with their eyes. Sometimes it seemed like they were fighting with their eyes alone.

The OP is just spectacular eye candy shining at you like a acid trip gone right! Many luscious colors and the nice Op song coupled with a cops and robbers animation theme are the right ingredients for one of the best anime openings this year.



Sound: Well there's nothing here except for praise :D.
The OP song "Paraiso" done by SOIL & "PIMP" SESSIONS is truely fitting with its funky south american jazz style.
Their music is really difficult to describe( well they created their own genre called "Death Jazz") but its just awesome and fitting and thats why you should check out their myspace site.

The ED "Best Friend" is done by Karutetto and is a more laid-back tune. Its a pop song (kind of) with a few hiphop intermezzos.

I really like both songs very much and they do a great job of getting you ready for either the start or the ending of the show.

The BGM was chosen with care, too. It is never annoying or inappropriate, its just blends in nicely and is a great indicator for when things settle down or get hectic in the show. Hectic, funky drum beats ( the stuff you hear at the brazilian carnival or like in CB) often work out well with the starting action scene and intensify the viewing experience. Letting the viewer get to feel the atmosphere like that makes the creators music choice even more worthwhile.



Story: People that haven't seen the last 4 episodes or only read the description on AniDB might think that the storyline is Mitchiko to Hatchin's weakest part. I partly have to disagree here. Well, the storyline might not really sound that imaginative but its flawless execution and the lack of plot holes, which can be found in a considerable amout of anime, is what makes it so solid.

The content of the 22 episodes spans over a period of 4 months in the world of Mitchiko to Hatchin. Starting from when the escaped convict Michiko Malandro comes to "save" Hana Morenos until the grand finale.
Since i don't want to spoil anthing here, but kinda have to in order to "defend" my vote for the story, here's the spoiler box.



Without spoiling anything i have to say that i was surprised by the ending. The last 4 episodes were really outstanding and the ending a twist(at least for me). If you might have the feeling that the storyline is dragging along all i can tell you is that you're looking at the wrong parts of the show (clarification in "Character")



Character: For me this is definately the best part of this series. The main characters are going on a journey to literally find themselves and each other. There are basically 2 different character combinations that lead to great character development.
Firstly the most important Michiko-Hatchin complex. Both main characters change tremendously during their journey. Hana learns how to stand up for herself and somebody she loves. That's why she changes from a shy little girl to a energetic and bright girl who knows what she wants. Michiko, a convict on the run learns about roles, grown-ups should act out in society and softens up a lot. There is a lot of interaction involved here and many emotions you can read from their eyes,lips and tears.

Secondly the Atsuko-Michiko complex. They share a past as friends but due to the choices made in life they are destined to cross parts many times as enemies. Both have their unique point of view and they just can't come to terms with the others actions. Apart from that they just can't kill each other. It's like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader without the "I'm your father" part.

Besides that, there are a few side characters worth mentioning since they play an important role.

Satoshi Batista is just a prime example of a villain. He's bad to the bone but all his actions are logical. He makes sense in every way and he also plays an big role in the series finale.

Hiroshi Morenos is the raison d'être for the beginning and the ending of the journey. That may sound like he's an important character but that's all he is. Well, i was a bit dissappointed in him but i can't spoil here.^^



Value&Enjoyment: Value and Enjoyment always lies in the eye of the beholder.

I loved this show.I loved the sound and both always managed to grasp my attention. Of course there were a few episodes that were rather laid-back. There wasn't any senseless violence or profanity and the character development was superb. I'm pretty sure that i'm going to rewatch the series soon and i can definately recommend it to anybody looking for a good anime series.

If you liked Cowboy Bebop youre going to like this.

Feel free to rate this review! Thanks for reading.