“My style is to have no fixed style. Other people would accuse me of having a style, though. It may be that I understand myself the least.” – Shingo Natsume
I’ll admit, I got off on the wrong foot with Shingo Natsume. My formal introduction to his work was One Punch Man, a show that seemed to me an embodiment of anime’s increasing artlessness and lack of narrative ambition, the growing divide between animated aesthetic form and meaningful narrative, emotional, or thematic content. It was simply “man punches hard” animated as beautifully as possible, and “man punches hard” is a story anime has told countless times, a story perhaps only outnumbered in its evocations by “me horny.” And as the years have gone by, it seems this divide between form and content has only widened, with modern animator troves like Jobless Reincarnation offering nothing of substance, while sequels and indistinguishable light novel adaptations dominate the wider landscape.
