Well folks, it’s that time again. With nearly every fall premiere now on the books, and me having also watched nearly all of those premieres, it’s time for me to break down what’s worth watching, what’s worth skipping, and what contains so much dark energy that merely glancing in its direction may scar your soul. It’s a serious duty, and I take it very seriously. Anime criticism is no joke!
As for this season in particular, I am thrilled to report that The Anime Is Good. After two straight seasons where I found myself having to stretch for a reasonable watch schedule, we are once again inundated with far too many good shows, in genres ranging from romance to drama to action to comedy and beyond. Several of this season’s premieres were genuinely stunning, far more offered sturdy entertainment from start to finish, and there were even some borderline efforts that still seemed like they might bloom into something wonderful. As usual, you can check out the full list of reviews over at ANN (check for Nick Creamer), or find quicker thoughts and my overall rankings below. Let’s celebrate some fresh new anime!
Shows That Turn Goodness Itself From an Abstract Concept into a Twenty Minute Cartoon
Run with the Wind is produced by much of the same Production I.G. team responsible for Haikyuu and Welcome to the Ballroom, except instead of adapting a much-hyped shounen property, they’re now handling an actual goddamn novel. The results are spectacular; Wind’s first episode introduces its characters with such grace, and is on the whole conveyed with such a palpable sense of atmosphere, that I felt entirely carried away into its world. From the brilliantly effective sound design to the fluid character animation and tremendously efficient dialogue, Run with the Wind feels like a team effort from a group operating at the peak of their abilities, and working on material that utterly rewards their efforts. Hanging somewhere between a character and sports drama, Run with the Wind is simply excellent, and earns my top recommendation of the season.
I still have some reservations about Gridman, mostly because Studio Trigger productions tend to start extremely strong and end extremely bad, but I can’t deny the strength of this episode. Director Akira Amemiya constructs a world that is balanced between intimate adolescent moments and grand fantasy spectacle in such a way as to instantly bring to mind classic Gainax properties like FLCL and Eva, buoyed by strong incidental dialogue and an inspired eye for overall compositions. Gridman is colorful and fanciful and well-observed and gripping, demonstrating once again that small character stories and world-shaking stakes are a natural combination. This show could easily tumble, but it’s starting from a pretty extreme high.
Shows You’d Be Proud to Take Home to the Parents
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
Guys, it’s friggin’ JoJo. If you’re familiar with the franchise, you probably understand why it ranks so highly, and if you’re not, you are truly missing out. JoJo is probably the most consistently excellent long-running action show of the last five years, possessing so much creativity and personality and weirdness that it puts most other shows to shame. After the gorgeous and totally cohesive design of Diamond is Unbreakable, Golden Wind feels like a bit of a step back for the franchise, but it’s still a stylish and thrilling adventure. JoJo is back, and the world is brighter for it.
Boarding School Juliet’s first episode makes some incredibly bad choices, which makes it all the more impressive that it still lands up here. The show’s most fundamental strength is that its main romantic leads both already feel real as people, and already possess a strong sense of chemistry. When you couple that with the show’s generally solid comedy, reasonable animation, and the fact that it’s about people who are already dating (shock!), you end up with a very strong romcom contender.
Of course, if you like your romances more towards the gentle, melancholy side, you could also try out Bloom into You. This quiet romance hones closely in on its heroine’s anxieties, offering a drama that is subdued, thoughtful, and often quite beautiful. Though I at times felt this one’s art design a little overbearing, the way it captures its leads’ feelings felt convincing enough to earn an easy recommendation from me.
Zombie Land Saga takes an inherently great/stupid premise (“what if we reanimated a bunch of famous idols to make a zombie idol supergroup”), and executes on it in such a way as to draw out all the wonderfully great/stupid resonance it can muster. The show’s jokes are fast-paced and genuinely funny, there are all sorts of great sight gags, and the production’s control of tone is strong enough for it to convincingly dip into outright horror segments. I was very happy to be so pleasantly surprised by this one.
Thunderbolt Fantasy’s first season already proved that “what if Gen Urobuchi wrote a work of Taiwanese puppet theater” was the greatest idea ever conceived, and season two is just here to remind us. The sequel’s first episode was a little too burdened by exposition to shine as brightly as the original’s highlights, but it’s still “what if JoJos were puppets written by Urobuchi,” and that’s still amazing. I don’t want to ruin Thunderbolt if you haven’t watched it – if you missed the first season, please give it a shot.
Double Decker is apparently somehow tied to the Tiger and Bunny franchise, but you don’t need to have watched that to enjoy this goofy-ass pop-art buddy cop story. Double Decker has an ostentatious sense of cool that is nicely balanced by its often absurd comedy, and the writing of this first episode did a great job of selling its two lead partners. If you like buddy cop stories, Double Decker is looking to be a great one.
Shows With Big Dreams That Aren’t Quite There Yet
As often happens for me, The Girl in Twilight was so good at establishing a convincing rapport between its bored teenage leads that I almost felt annoyed when the actual plot started. Fortunately, between that strong dialogue and the genuinely intriguing nature of this show’s dimension-crossing premise, the show as a whole doesn’t really suffer from having stuff actually happen. A reasonable premiere all around.
Release the Spyce’s premise is essentially “what if a club of high school girls were also secretly the stars of Mission Impossible,” and your reaction to this episode will likely be entirely dependent on your reaction to that sentence. The show certainly succeeds in nailing the appeal of that hook, so if that’s your jam, go to it.
Generally strong visuals, snappy writing, and an engaging lead character help Hinomaru Sumo rise just above the median line for sports dramas, offering an altogether professionally constructed and pretty darn engaging premiere. This season’s actually pretty light on traditional shounen sports shows, so Sumo kinda wins the field by default.
Bakumatsu is one of the many super-arbitrary quasi-historical character-stuffed dramas we’re regularly subjected to in the era of mobage adaptations, but as far as those shows go, this one possesses reasonable visuals and a surprisingly convincing rapport between its two leads. This is still probably going to turn into an aimless procession of anachronistic cute boys, but within that genre, these cute boys are some of the best around.
Shows Whose Failings Probably Don’t Matter if You’re a Sucker For Their Genre
On the positive side, Iroduku’s ambitious premise and gorgeous art design made this one of the most arresting and visually impactful shows of the season. On the negative side, I’m pretty sure you could have replaced this show’s heroine with a desk lamp at any point during this episode and I wouldn’t have noticed. If Iroduku’s heroine can grow a personality, P.A. Works’ latest could easily launch itself into genuine greatness.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
Bunny Girl Senpai wants extremely badly to be a show like Oregairu or Bakemonogatari, but it lacks either the close human insight or genuine wit of those titans. It’s still probably better than most shows that don’t try to be Oregairu/Bake, and its characters definitely have more depth to them than the average bear, but shows this slow and cynical kinda need killer writing to justify themselves, and Bunny Girl isn’t really there.
Dakaichi’s excellent character writing and genuinely funny premise would actually put it in the next tier up, if not for BL’s frustrating tendency to frame sexual assault as romantic. If you’re inoculated to the genre’s proclivities, there’s a very well-scripted and altogether engaging romance here; if the genre’s bullshit makes you shake your head, steer clear.
Radiant is an utterly textbook “neither good nor bad” shounen property, going through the long-settled early beats of a property like Black Clover with zero distinction whatsoever. If literally the exact default shounen template with no frills appeals to you, Radiant will probably be a reasonable time, but personally I like my shows with more seasoning than a glass of water on the side.
Shows Which Could Probably Seem Watchable If You Sort of Scrunch Your Eyes Like You’re Viewing a Magic Picture Book or Something
This premiere started with a totally nonsensical mobage, transformed that into a wholly incoherent anime premise, and executed on that premise with all the grace of a walrus attempting to learn tap dancing. I had a good time with the first episode of SPACE FISH (the show’s far superior subtitle), but it was more a laughing “at” than “with” sort of situation.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
The tremendous visual creativity with which Slime conveyed the process of being transported across dimensions into a slime’s body only made me all that more frustrated by the profound creative dead end embodied by all of this episode’s narrative choices. Please someone, put the isekai genre out of its misery.
“The one charmingly inept Chinese coproduction” almost seems like a seasonal tradition at this point, so even though Chinese producers are now directly involved with a variety of reasonable shows each season, I appreciate Xuan Yuan for keeping the faith.
Goblin Slayer’s premiere was a fifty-fifty split between “profoundly misanthropic and juvenile torture porn” and “gritty, weighted dungeon crawler,” so consider its score something like a compromise between a 1 and a 4. I’d probably actually keep watching the show in this episode’s second half, but its first half was so vile that I can’t really see things improving.
Anima Yell! at least has some pretty backgrounds to distract from its non-jokes, which is more than I can say about this season’s other harmless slice of life property.
Ms. vampire who lives in my neighborhood
Hey other harmless slice of life property, I heard this writer was talkin’ shit.
Shows That Prove Even in the Darkest of Times, It is Still Possible to Further Diminish Your Faith in Humanity
Ulysses: Jeanne d’Arc and the Alchemist Knight
Ulysses earns the questionable distinction of landing in my bottom rung not through overt awfulness, but just by being so unaccomplished and boring. Damn, Ulysses.
Remember when OreImo was considered trashy? Such innocent times.
And that covers it for me! Having watched far too many friggin’ anime over this past week, I’m looking forward to spending the next eleven or so weeks enjoying shows it is actually possible to enjoy. I hope you all had a reasonable time this retrospective, and can assure you that if I didn’t like one of your favorites, it’s just because I’m a mondo dumbass with glue for brains. There’s a ton of very reasonable anime this season in a wide variety of genres, and I sincerely hope you all find plenty of new shows to love. Let’s watch some cartoons!
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be so great about Juliet though. Watched the first episode and it was pretty plain looking and predictable, the characters weren’t especially charming and the setting was downright ridiculous (which would have been okay with a different overall tone, but here was played way too straight. What kind of school rivalry do they have, that sexually assaulting the opposing dorm’s leader is considered a fair move?).
As for the rest, I guess Jojo and Zombie Land are the two shows I “feel” the most. Run with the Wind seems really nice but I wonder if it’ll stay good for its full length, it will have to be more than just people training and running. Similar reasoning applies to Gridman (though I’ll argue against ALL Trigger shows having a downwards spiral, their latest offer in the mecha genre certainly did have a massive one).
For sure it did. Darling in the Franxx had 18 episodes of gold, and the best female character of all anime, but the show didn’t respect its own symbolism, its own patterns, and its own trajectory, leading to something like a toxic dumpster fire. Still gave it a 10/10, but that’s because of a killer romantic arc (episodes 12-15 surpass everything except maybe Re:Zero 18), one of the best slice of life arcs (16-18), the most genuinely human, well-rendered character I’ve ever encountered in art (Zero Two), and because of the way it used the apocalypse: to understand humanity as male and female together. That freaking Jian Bird, yo!
Warm coffee, gentle rain, and Bobbuh writing about a whole bunch of anime. A wonderful way to start a day. ^_^
Goblin Slayer is pretty much the second half going forward especially once our main party is established, who are all quite fun, might I add.
Wow, that My Sister My Writer review was amazing. A+ prose
At least the Bunny Girl Senpai review made me chuckle :).
Definitely got me interested in Run with the Wind.
Gridman… i’m going to follow your reviews. And a few others. I still love Kill la Kill after all.
JoJo is JoJo. Or GioGio.
Aaand i think that’s all for me this season! Might get interested in something else, but am currently catching up on some classics so ehh this season will mostly be a pass from me.
There’s no denying that many isekai shows play out like a glorified display of video game with cheat codes enabled. However, you have to remember that there’s a significant overlap between people who are interested in Japanese subculture and people who are gamers, especially in Japan (which is the primary market for most of these things). So it makes sense they want to make the best of both worlds, literally and figuratively speaking, by going about things in accordance with what the majority of their demographic want.
Although I must also emphasize that in this show this parallelism with videogames only occurs in the presentation, really the real tone of the story differs a lot when it presents other obligations related to the different development difficulties of a new nation.
https://imgur.com/gallery/jLOFfs6
Bet you regret talking shit about Goblin Slayer now, don’t you tough guy?