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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Invoking the name of Sherlock Holmes sets a lot of expectations for a series. It sets the expectations that your series is going to be a mystery series, where the way the mysteries will be solved will be through the detective using deductive reasoning and through keen powers of observation – and also that the detective will have an audience-perspective sidekick who is intelligent and perceptive, but not as much as the detective. Holmes of Kyoto is, occasionally, that. However, just as much of the time, it’s a relationship drama, and not necessarily a well-executed relationship drama. (more…)
Girls Und Panzer (which I reviewed at Bureau42, not here), was a show that I absolutely loved. It had a sports anime plot for a sport that didn’t exist in the real world, Sensha-do, the art of Tankery: the art of crewing and maintaining a tank, and succeeding in combat using that tank – though Sensha-Do competitions are not to the death. (more…)
One of my favorite works of anime fantasy is Record of Lodoss War. It’s a show that I try to watch at least once a year, and due to my appreciation of that, I’ve sought out the various works by its creator, Ryo Mizuno, which have gotten a US release, from the Lodoss series onwards. In any case, when Record of Grancrest War was announced, and that even more it was related to a tabletop RPG that Mizuno had created, I was definitely onboard to check this out.