A while back I reviewed the anime We Never Learn: Bokuben – and I described it as a fanservice anime with Enthusiastic Consent. Hensuki is, unfortunately, less so.
Read moreHensuki: Anime Review
Lupin the Third Part IV: Anime Review
Lupin the Third is a character who refuses to be tied down. Like Tom Servo, he’s like the wind, baby. His various earlier anime series and films have set him up as a consummate flirt and womanizer, and his adventures have spanned the globe. Lupin the Third Part IV upends that status quo immediately in both respects. In the second, Lupin’s adventures in this series are generally limited to Italy. In the first case, the series opens with Lupin getting married, and not to Fujiko Mine.
Read moreO Maidens in Your Savage Season – Anime Review
Occasionally, I watch an anime series that I feel utterly unqualified to review. Sometimes it’s something like Angel’s Egg, where I can clearly feel the concepts flying over my head and ruffling my hair – where I can tell what I’m seeing is art, but I lack the vocabulary to properly expand on the concept. In the case of O Maidens in Your Savage Season, it’s life experiences.
Read moreFruits Basket Season 1 (2019): Anime Review
When I was in High School, Fruits Basket came out in the US and it was a phenomenon. the manga was the flagship of Tokyopop’s unflipped manga (or “100% Authentic Manga”) initiative, and its success led to the majority of manga in the US being published unflipped, and also cemented a longstanding partnership between Tokyopop and Borders which lasted until both went bankrupt – all of that fueled as well by the success of the anime. Now, about 18 years later, long enough for the high school kids who grew up on FuruBa to have kids of their own, there is a new anime adaptation of Fruits Basket, with the first season airing this year.
Read moreHow Heavy Are the Dumbells That You Lift?: Anime Review
I’m a sucker for anime series that are intended to be somewhat educational. So, when How Heavy Are the Dumbells That You Lift came up on the seasonal anime charts, it ended up on my to-watch list. While there is some debate about how healthy this show is, I’m glad it exists.
Read morePromare: Anime Review
This past week I saw the theatrical release of the first film from Studio Trigger – Promare. Here are my thoughts.
Read moreAstra: Lost in Space – Anime Review
A while back, when I had started my fanzine with the intent of getting established science fiction fans, in particular, those who read fanzines (a demographic that is generally more likely to vote and nominate in the Hugos), to watch and nominate speculative fiction anime – I started with a list. I gave a list of anime series that had come out since the turn of the millennium which I thought literary speculative fiction fans would enjoy. Among them was Bodacious Space Pirates, a science fiction anime which I felt took the sense of adventure and wonder that was a fixture of ‘50s and ’60s YA Space Adventure science fiction, kept that, and dropped the obsolete political and social views that fill so many works of that period. Astra: Lost in Space is the next anime that tries this and pulls it off spectacularly.
Read moreLaid Back Camp: Anime Video Review
This week I’m starting my September Anime block with a very chill anime about camping in the off season – Laid Back Camp.
Read moreRobiHachi: Anime Review
RobiHachi is a very different show than most of the anime series I’ve seen – particularly those about travel. Most anime series that are about travel and tourism that I’ve seen tend to be chill slice of life comedies, like Laid Back Camp. RobiHachi, on the other hand, is a very silly, wacky, over-the-top comedy – though one with some thematic elements in common with those other series.
Read moreGundam 0083: Stardust Memory – Anime Review
I first watched Mobile Suit Gundam: Stardust Memory when I was in High School, a little after 9/11. The story worked for me at that time, when all the Gundam I’d seen had been the Gundam compilation films and Char’s Counterattack. Since then I’ve seen considerably more Gundam (including Zeta Gundam) since then.
Read moreWe Never Learn: Anime Review
A lot of fanservice anime tends to be gross. Maybe it’s because the fanservice comes through sexual slapstick of the “Whoops I fell and groped you or looked up your skirt” variety. Or it comes through battle damage of the “Female character gets their top shredded in combat and now their boobs are hanging out” variety. Or it’s of the “Male lead openly sexually harasses female characters variety.” Perhaps that’s why the fanservice that comes up in We Never Learn feels like a breath of fresh air.
Read more5 Anime Series to Watch After Neon Genesis Evangelion
Well, you’ve just finished watching Evangelion on Netflix, and you’re wondering what to watch after this. I have a few recommendations here for you. The video is fairly spoiler-light so if you’re making your way through the show now, you should be fine.
Lists of all the works I recommend below the cut/further down, with affiliate links for Amazon and the Crunchyroll Store, and streaming links, where available. Buying anything through affiliate links helps to support the show.
Dororo: Anime Review
There are works of anime and manga which view feudal Japan with a less than critical eye. Dororo is not one of those works. The original manga by Osamu Tezuka was a work that, while more than a little cartoonish (as this was ’60s Tezuka), looked on the realities of Japan leading into the Warring States period with a critical eye. The 2019 anime adaptation of the work keeps a similar appraisal of the period.
Read moreAnime Video Review: Today’s Menu for Emiya Family
This week I’m taking a look at a cooking anime series from last year – Today’s Menu for Emiya Family.
Read moreLaid Back Camp: Anime Review
Never has an anime been so perfect in its title as Laid Back Camp. This is a chill, relaxing, and also educational anime.
Read moreSpace Runaway Ideon: Anime Review
Yoshiyuki Tomino has something of a reputation as an anime director, for multiple reasons. Tomino has a reputation for being full of himself. His interviews about Brainpowerd in Animerica magazine demonstrate this. Anyone who has gone to an anime con and asked a Japanese guest who worked with him for a “Tomino story” can attest to this. Tomino also has a reputation for his absolute ruthlessness for killing off characters in his work. The normal examples of this are Zeta Gundam, the last half of ZZ Gundam, and Char’s Counterattack. However, the work that started Tomino down this road was Space Runaway Ideon. (Pronounced E-day-on).
Read moreFate/Extella: The Umbral Star – Video Game Review
One of my guilty pleasures is the Dynasty Warriors games. They’re fun, engaging, somewhat mindless hack-and-slash games. However, they are not without their faults. There comes a point where you’ve put the Yellow Turban Rebellion down enough times that you just can’t play through it anymore. Thus the appeal of the other takes on the concept from within Koei and without. Such is the case with Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star.
Read moreMy Hero Academia: A Neurodiverse Reading
This past year, as part of my weekend anime viewings with my parents, we watched all of My Hero Academia over the course of a few months. As I watched the show, something struck me. Deku and his struggles with mastering One For All are a really good metaphor for my experiences with Autism.
Read moreAnime Review: The Magnificient Kotobuki
If you’d read my review of Area 88, you may recall that I gushed over the gorgeously depicted dogfights in that show. Since then I’ve been looking for something that scratched that itch. Not necessarily with the amount of grit that Area 88 did – but still, something that had exciting, tense fighter dogfights. The Winter 2018 anime season brought me the thing that I’d been waiting for. Specifically, it brought me The Magnificent Kotobuki, from the writer and director of Shirobako and Girls Und Panzer. Now, the series had some difficulty taking off for some fans because of the stylistic choices the director made. However, once it got airborne, in my view The Magnificent Kotobuki became a fantastic action anime.
Read moreAnime Review: Boogiepop and Others (2019)
In my review last week of the first Boogiepop Omnibus, I talked about this year’s Boogiepop anime series. Since I recorded that episode, I’ve finished watching the series, and have some thoughts of the show.
Read moreAnime Review: Fate/stay night – Heaven’s Feel II. Lost Butterfly
It feels like an unnecessary point to say, but it bears mentioning nonetheless – Fate/Stay Night: Heaven’s Feel II. Lost Butterfly is very much the middle installment of a trilogy. While the first film in this route, Presage Flower, had a very dark ending, this film manages to go into darker places and ends in a dire place. While the first two routes had a degree of brightness to their endings, and I have no doubt that
It also bears mentioning going in, and I’m mentioning this before the cut for those who don’t want to read further before seeing the film – even though I’m going to minimize spoilers, that I would give this film a content advisory for sexual assault and suicide. Neither is depicted explicitly on screen (sort of), but it comes up, so it’s important to know going in.
Read moreAnime Review: Today’s Menu for Emiya Family
When I think of food porn in anime, I think of Food Wars – in part because of the risque reactions to the food, but more so because of the very involved dishes that are featured in the work – some of them are dishes that I feel I could make with some time and practice, but there are more than few others that I don’t think I could pull off, due to ingredients that aren’t available, or techniques that can be tricky to master (filleting a cut of meat, for example). Though there are a few other series that focus on food that is easier to pull off in the home, like Sweetness and Lightning.
Read moreAnime Review: Double Decker – Doug and Kiril
Double Decker: Doug and Kiril is from the same studio and creative team who brought us Tiger and Bunny – a series that I’ve only seen in part, back when Neon Alley was a Thing That Existed. So, I can say, with a degree of confidence, that you need to know nothing about Tiger & Bunny to get into this series.
Read moreAnime Review: Gundam NT
When I heard about the upcoming release of Gundam NT (or Gundam Narrative) the thought I had coming in was that the film was going to be the kickoff point for the next chapter of the saga of the Universal Century. That, after the conclusion of Gundam Unicorn set up something of a new status quo, this would start a series of films that would basically lay the groundwork for eventually reaching F91, Crossbone Gundam, and Victory Gundam.
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