This month, we take a look at Mamoru Oshii’s Cyberpunk masterpiece, Ghost in the Shell (from 1995), along with giving some thoughts on the live-action adaptation from 2017, joined by Blaine Dowler.
Next month, we take a look at Macross II.
Blaine can be found on the Babylon 5 30 Years Later Podcast (https://shows.acast.com/babylon-5-30-years-later), and the 99 Years 100 Films Podcast (https://shows.acast.com/99-years-100-films)
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In the past few years of anime streaming, we have had escalating forms of “Streaming Jail”. First, there was Netflix Jail, where a show would sit on TV in Japan but was licensed for streaming in English on Netflix, so you had to wait until the show was done. Then there was Disney+ Jail, where the show was licensed on Disney+ internationally, and you had to wait and see if it went on that service in your region. Now, with Your Forma, we have Smart-device Specific Jail, where a series is only licensed for streaming to a service that’s locked to a specific company’s smart devices. Good news for me – I have a Samsung smartphone and tablet. Bad news for Your Forma – it can’t make it to viewers who don’t.
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Gundam Quuuux is a bit of a tricky series to recommend. First, it has the continuation of a problem that appears to have started with Witch From Mercury of series that just didn’t have enough time for their plot and characters to breathe, and not (as was the case with First Gundam) because it was cut short due to poor ratings or sponsors bailing. Second, it’s an alternative universe take on the Universal Century that doesn’t provide a lot of hooks for people who are new to that timeline. I enjoyed it, but I wonder how much of that is due to my own familiarity with the events and characters it’s playing with.
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Wind Breaker’s second season, at first glance, seems like it’s characterization is weaker than the series first season, with protagonist Haruka Sakura taking a backseat to some of the supporting cast. Instead I’d say the characterization of Sakura moves in a different direction, though we do get more development for one of the members of Bofurin’s Four Kings.
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Ghu Bless the Reiwa-era rom-com! We have, with Please Put Them On, Takamine-San!, which I’m just going to call Takamine-san going forward, a fanservice comedy that generally nails the character dynamics. This includes sexual slapstick that has consent (except one bit in the first episode)! This isn’t a bar that you’d think would need to be cleared, but it is, and it has, though its head did strike the bar.
Read moreThis month, the Buccharati Crew takes their shot at taking over Passione.
Next month, we watch the original Ghost in the Shell.
The show is now available on Netflix, and it’s a pick for the bonus episodes on the Axe of the Blood God Podcast, so it’s time to cover the show here, on my YouTube channel, instead of just on my blog.
The first half of Frieren is available on Blu-Ray from (Affiliate Links):
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Ameku MD wears the legacy of House MD on the sleeve of its scrubs. It’s a show where, in the first episode, someone suggests Lupus while working on our first case, only for it to be dismissed. It generally does an interesting job with its characters and mysteries, but I’m not sure why I don’t like it.
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I’m Living With An Otaku NEET Kunoichi?! is a gag anime that aired in the Winter 2025 season, and was the fanservice show I went with this cour. It’s an okay example of its genre, and the jokes generally land fairly well, but the series is not without some issues.
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I watched some of the original Aquarion series back when it first aired before streaming services were a thing, and if you were watching anime as it came out you were watching it fan-subbed. It was semi-infamous among fandom circles as the show where the pilots’ orgasm when the mechs combine. Having fallen off on most of the subsequent series, the new installment, Aquarion: Myth of Emotions had enough of a gap from the last that this felt like a decent place to jump on.
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Anyway, I’m Falling In Love With You is probably the more melodramatic of the romance anime I watched this winter 2025. It’s a reverse harem that tries to do things with parallel narrative threads, one in the “present” (ostensibly a couple of years in the future) and one in the past. It’s also trying to do a COVID-19 Pandemic story, with varying degrees of success.
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So, in the interest of full disclosure – this is me reviewing a show that isn’t actually officially licensed for a US release yet, so I’m not going to make any comments about the quality of the translation on here (not just due to my lack of fluency). In this case, I’m taking a look at one of the more comedic the romantic comedies of this season – I Have A Crush At Work.
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Zenshu, as an anime series, very easily could have been the most self-indulgent of the isekai anime to come out in a while – an anime series about an animator who dies and is sent to another world where their cheat skill is related to animation. However, the show manages to stick the landing, serving as something of a love-letter to classic anime films.
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There’s something of a genre of anime and manga that’s started in the wake of Spy X Family – the Domestic Action Series – a series about characters who are balancing a relaxing domestic life with also working (or having worked) in fields that require them to be spectacularly good at carrying out violence. In the case of this year’s Sakamoto Days, it’s a case of an assassin who had gotten out of the game and settled down for domestic life – but unlike (say) John Wick his family is still very much alive.
Read moreThis week, I’ve got an older animer review – Tengoku Daimakiyo (or Heavenly Delusion, as the manga is localized as).
Tengoku Daimakiyo is available for streaming on Hulu/Disney+
Read moreInspired by a recent video by ProZD, I give 5 older anime that I’d love to see get a new take.
It’s been a while since I read a nonfiction book about anime. A couple of years ago, I read Anime: A History by Johnathan Clements and found it enjoyable (though admittedly, I never got around to doing a prose review here—just a video review). Well, I’ve ended up coming across another overview book on Anime—this time from the hosts of the Ghibliotheque podcast, appropriately titled The Ghibliotheque Guide to Anime, so I figured it was worth a read.
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At the end of 2024, having missed the submission date for regular Anime Secret Santa, I decided to take part in AniList’s Secret Santa event (my AniList profile is here, by the way). The show I ended up getting in my pick was Majestic Prince – a show that had ended up on my watchlist anyway due to it showing up early in Super Robot Wars 30. So, after finishing my rewatch of season 3 of Thunderbolt Fantasy for the Anime Explorations Podcast, I moved on to this.
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When I finished A Certain Magical Index Season 2, and sat down to write this review, I thought I’d also reviewed Season 1. It turns out I have not – so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this review. Hopefully it will go fairly quickly, because while I cannot speak for the novels, but the anime version of these stories is a remarkably breezy watch.
Read moreNot a lot to say about MF Ghost Season 2. I enjoyed it, and will move on to season 3 when it comes out. However, the show is getting kind of formulaic at this point – season 1 wrapped with qualifying for the race that started season 2 and took up most of the season – ending in qualifying and the start of the following race. We have some character beats in between, but most of the season is focused on the racing. It’s well-animated and well-paced racing, but there isn’t much more to say. It looks like Season 3 is likely going to shape up to more of the same. So, if you’re looking for some auto racing anime to watch (or you want something to save to watch during the off-season of your auto racing of choice), this is a good candidate.
However, I’m probably not going to review Season 3 or subsequent seasons, unless they do something really stand out.
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It feels weird praising a show about a business – and a startup at that – in the times we’re in, but such is the case with Magilumiere. It’s one of several shows over the past few years that have used the framework of Japanese corporate storytelling to kinda give a discrete middle finger at more toxic elements of Japanese corporate culture, while depicting a framework that could potentially not suck – in this case also, in a weird way, riffing on what a modern Japanese take on Ghostbusters might look like.
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DanDaDan is an anime series that has a rough start. If someone were to drop it after the first episode, I’d completely understand. As the series goes on it tells a story with a tremendous mix of action, humor, and charm, but I’d also say that some of those rougher risque elements never quite go away.
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