Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is, I think, the perfect counterpoint to Shirobako. Shirobako was a show about the business and the process of making anime. It’s about what goes into the shows you watch every week. By comparison, Eizouken is much more about the joy of creation.
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Special 7: Anime Review
Special 7 is the last of the big anime series I’d watched in the Fall 2019 season that finished that season – Azur Lane was delayed, Blade of the Immortal, Fate/Grand Order, and My Hero Academia were two-cour series, and I dropped Babylon. It’s an interesting anime series that takes the concept of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and applies it in an urban fantasy context, but doesn’t quite have as much to say.
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We Never Learn Season 2: Anime Review
The first season of We Never Learn ended with an announcement for a second season. With the manga being based around college preparation and studying for that, I did definitely have a sense that whether or not the manga was actually done at this point, whatever the second season ended on was going to have some degree of finality – with how the anime was paced, I couldn’t really see a way to wrap here without getting into graduation. Without too many spoilers before the cut, it does get to graduation, and in hindsight, I think the ending kind of works well.
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Vinland Saga: Anime Review
2019 wrapped up with an anime series that put itself on my list of anime to recommend to non-anime fans. That anime was Vinland Saga – and even better, it was on Amazon Prime, a streaming service that generally a lot of non-anime fans subscribe to.
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No Guns Life Season 1: Anime Review
It’s kind of been a while since we got a major cyberpunk anime that was outside of the general orbit of Masamune Shirow. Season 2 of SAO, from the description of the arc, was something that I might describe as cyberpunk adjacent – but otherwise, I generally didn’t see much that didn’t have a connection to Shirow or one of the series he created in the listings. So, when No Guns Life came up in the Anime Chart, I figured it was worth checking out.
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After School Dice Club: Anime Review
Well, the Fall 2019 anime season has (as of when this goes live) wrapped up, so it’s time to start giving thoughts on some of the anime from the tail end of the year – and we start off with After School Dice Club, a healing anime about Euro-style board games.
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My 10 Favorite Anime of the 2010s
Well, we have come to the end of the 2010s, a decade where I actually was much more on top of watching new anime each season – more or less – in part because the rise of streaming made it possible to actually do that in an affordable manner. This past decade also saw me get my Bachelor’s degree, and go to Worldcon for the first time, in a semi-vain attempt to get lit-SF fans to give anime the time of day.
So, I’m going to do a run-down of my favorite Anime of the 2010s that I’ve seen. I will be doing one series per year – and again, this is show’s I’ve seen. Just because a show is not included doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch it or didn’t like it. Additionally, I have a massive List of Shame, so just because a show didn’t make the list doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested.
I’m choosing one show per year, that I watched, and that I generally enjoyed. Each show will have links to where you can watch the series, and affiliate links to where you can buy it – buying anything through those links helps to support the site.
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5 Favorite Anime of 2019
Well, another year come and gone, so it’s time for me to give some thoughts on my favorite shows of 2019 that I’ve seen. The keyword here is that I’ve seen. There are plenty of great shows this year that I missed, whether because they’re sequels to earlier seasons (Symphogear), or they just slipped under my radar, so I’ll need to come back to them later. As with all of my lists, these are in no particular order, so don’t consider a lower spot in the list, nor an absence from the list, as a slight against that work.
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My Hero Academia – Two Heroes: Anime Review
When it comes to anime films that tie-in to ongoing shonen series, generally they tend to not be canonical – and basically exist to show a whole bunch of additional cool fights. My Hero Academia: Two Heroes is basically that, except with the nice addition of showing a little bit more of All Might’s backstory, through the introduction of an old friend from his earlier career.
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Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Anime Review
After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.
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Penguin Highway: Anime Review
At Kumoricon 2019, I had the good fortune of getting into a screening of the anime film Penguin Highway. It is an anime film of a variety that doesn’t come out in the US very much – an anime film that is a straight-up family adventure film, and a film that also plays into some of the Kids on Bikes concepts that came up in a few works I’ve reviewed recently (The Gate and Tales from the Loop).
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What the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher?: Anime Review
When it comes to concepts related to fanservice in anime, there are some that are very hard to do well. One of them, probably the biggest one of them, is what I call “Sexual Slapstick.” It’s someone walking into a room and seeing someone undressing, or tripping and falling and copping a feel (or seeing something they shouldn’t. They’re all based around acts that are gross, which means it can be hard to make funny. Season one of We Never Learn did it and What the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher? also manages to actually pull it off.
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Ultraman Season 1: Anime Review
This past year or so we had a fair number of anime series paying tribute to classic Tokusatsu series from Tsuburya Productions. The most high profile of these was S.S.S.S. Gridman, with Netflix’s Ultraman Season 1 (adapting the manga) coming out earlier, and flying under the radar. There are a few reasons for that – Gridman had Trigger’s rep going for it, instead of being a totally CG anime series, and was released in English in a more conventional manner instead of the Netflix binge model. As far as how much each of those contributed – well, I can’t get into specifics without delving into Steiner Math (which I flunked in college). That said, the show is still fun, and worth your time.
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Yu-No (2019): Anime Review
There are some anime with a strong first half, and then which utterly shits the bed in the second half of the show. Yu-No, an anime series based off of an Eroge (and which had an earlier hentai adaptation back in the ’90s) is one of those shows.
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Cop Craft: Anime Review
With the Summer 2019 anime season, while I enjoyed El Melloi II Case Files, I found it somewhat lacking as a mystery or detective series and had hoped that Cop Craft would make up for that. Cop Craft executes its Urban Fantasy Buddy-Cop story well from a narrative standpoint, but less so from an animation standpoint.
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Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Anime Review
Lord El-Melloi II is a mystery series that breaks from the conventions of the genre. Specifically, the convention of using the question of “Howdunit” to determine “Whodunit”. When urban fantasy normally sets into this territory, you see writers structure out their magic system to fit within this magical structure. Lord El-Melloi II, on the other hand, tosses convention out on its head and decides to play Calvinball instead.
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Hensuki: Anime Review
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.
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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.
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O 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.
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Fruits 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.
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Promare: Anime Review
This past week I saw the theatrical release of the first film from Studio Trigger – Promare. Here are my thoughts.
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Laid 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.
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RobiHachi: 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.
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Gundam 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.
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