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 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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Much as Urusei Yatsura received a revival from David Production, now Ranma 1/2 has started to receive a revival from Mappa, distributed internationally by Netflix. It’s a pretty good adaptation, though thus far it hasn’t had any of the series trickier elements to deal with.
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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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My Dress-Up Darling was a show I enjoyed immensely and one I ended up watching multiple times, including for the Anime Explorations Podcast. I appreciated how the show got into the work of creating cosplay costumes. However, it felt like there was something missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Watching the first season of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction made me realize what those things were, because this show filled those gaps remarkably well.
Read moreSo far, for the Fall 2024 season, I’ve only dropped one show so far – and that was How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer. The short version for that is this – I was interested in the show as a sort of gender-fluid BL-lite series. Not quite full on BL, but a series that could play with the tropes in interesting ways. However, the second episode felt a lot like it was relying a lot on “No Homo” jokes – to enough of a point that I basically went “Nah” – and I decided to drop it and pick up a proper BL anime later. So, How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer does not get a recommend from me.
The Elusive Samurai is an anime series based on a manga from the creator of Assassination Classroom. That series was one that skewered the Japanese educational system through the context of a Shonen Fight manga – so I was interested to see how The Elusive Samurai handles Japanese history.
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This weekend I’m quickly bop through a bit of a trio of romantic comedies from the Summer Season, which might not necessarily bear a full-length review, but are worth at least a bit of conversation. Specifically – I’m reviewing the second season of Cafe Terrace and Its’ Goddesses, Pseudo Harem, and Days With My Stepsister.
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I have heard very good things for quite some time about mangaka Inio Asano’s work – and I’ve also heard it’s tremendously bleak to the point of absolute nihilism, so for a while, I’ve been hesitant to read his stuff. When I learned his manga Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction (henceforth DeDeDeDe) was getting an anime adaptation and that it was one of his more… approachable works, I figured I would give the show a watch. The resulting show is interesting and messy – messy in some intentional ways, and some ways that may not be (and if those other ways are intentional it doesn’t reflect well on him).
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Spy X Family has joined One Piece and My Hero Academia in the annals of (at the time of release) currently running Shonen Jump (or Jump+) anime adaptations that have gotten non-canonical (or mostly non-canonical in the case of MHA) anime film tie-ins. In this case, we have Spy X Family: Code White, which sends the Forger family on a weekend vacation to the mountains, leading to some Bond-Film-level shenanigans.
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It’s been a minute since we’d gotten a particularly good urban fantasy mystery anime series. When Mysterious Disappearances came up on the seasonal Anime List, it looked interesting, and I added it to my watchlist. I was not disappointed with what I got.
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After having read the manga Crows a while back, I got a new appreciation of the Juvenile Delinquent manga, so when a Juvenile Delinquent anime, Wind Breaker, showed up in the Spring 2024 anime list, I figured I should give it a try. It didn’t have the same degree of character depth as Crows, but I still found it to be an enjoyable show.
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Laid Back Camp has, consistently, been a chill (you might even say “Laid Back”) anime series about informing the viewer about going camping, while also providing some chill vibes to accompany it, and it has generally succeeded. Season 2 stepped some things up by having some arcs include potential complications you can run into while camping – and the film covered some of the wrinkles you can run into if you decide to make a campground. Season 3 continues with the chill vibes, while also getting into “What might you have to deal with when traveling to your campground?”
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Urusei Yatsura’s 3rd season is the one that wraps up the series – putting most of the cast into varying degrees of relationships, while also finding – in an indirect way – a way for Ataru to express his feelings to Lum without either shedding their stubborn exteriors.
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Often with an anime series, you get the caveat of “Oh, it has a weak start, but it really sticks the landing in the conclusion” or the warning of “Oh, it has a good start, but really fumbles the landing”. Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included has the weird instance of being a series with a weak start, a weak end, but a really strong middle portion of the series. The series, which I’m going to just call Studio Apartment for the sake of brevity – starts out as a pretty standard magical girlfriend series, and ends as a magical girlfriend harem series – but there’s a moment in the middle, where the series really finds its feet as the supporting cast builds up – and where it has some interesting humor to go with it.
Read moreWe discuss the start of the Spring Anime season, along with some of the failings of Gundam SEED, before moving into Ippon Again.
I watched Synduality: Noir in a previous season, enjoyed it, and was looking forward to the second season. The second half of the series does do a good job of changing up the dynamic, exploring a few more of the world’s mysteries, and bringing the series to something of a satisfactory conclusion.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Metallic Rouge is Studio Bones celebrating its 10th anniversary by going back to its routes with an original anime series, with an action show about a pair of ambiguously lesbian characters going on a journey – in this case a science fiction trip through various planets in the solar system, in the process uncovering several mysteries about the world. The problem is that the series, at 12 episodes, doesn’t quite have the time to really do justice to all the themes that they want to cover.
Spoilers below the cut.
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Solo Leveling was one of the web novel titles that I remember seeing promoted heavily by Yen Press. It was one of the first of these Web Novel turned Light Novel titles that got an audiobook release in the US, and generally it had a fair amount of buzz behind it. So, when an anime adaptation came up on the Seasonal charts, I decided it was time to find out what all the buzz was about.
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