Tag Archives: Why It Works

Why It Works: Fabulous Hair, and Other Character Design Fundamentals

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For this week’s Why It Works, I leapfrogged off Ninny’s absolutely fantastic hair from Burn the Witch, in order to discuss the nature and importance of character designs more generally. I don’t often focus too much on characters’ fashion choices in my critiques, but I have a great deal of respect for the difficult craft of character design, and Tite Kubo has always been one of the best when it comes to designing stylish characters. Let’s get to it!

Fabulous Hair, and Other Character Design Fundamentals

Why It Works: What Are the Fundamentals of Great Horror Anime?

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This week in Why It Works, I capitalized on Halloween’s approach to write a general article about how tricky it is to make animation scary, and what tools of the medium you can use to alleviate that inherent obstacle. It’s difficult to make an audience scared of an animated monster, but it’s certainly possible to make the audience feel trapped, and from there they’ll frequently do the work themselves. Let’s get to it!

What Are the Fundamentals of Great Horror Anime?

Why It Works: The World is the Game: Designing Worlds After Breath of the Wild

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For this actual week’s Why It Works post, I ended up writing an article I’ve been meaning to write for years, and gushing a whole lot about how Breath of the Wild fundamentally changed open world game design. We’re already seeing a variety of new games that move the genre away from the prevailing Ubisoft model, and I could not be happier about it. Let’s get to it!

The World is the Game: Designing Worlds After Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild

Why It Works: Introducing the Incredible Director of the Horimiya Adaptation!

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This week (well, last week, technically), I ended up springboarding off the Horimiya anime announcement to ramble about Masashi Ishihama. Ishihama is one of the industry’s unsung greats, so I’m always happy for an excuse to celebrate his catalog, and pray once more that his next work is the one that breaks him big. It should have been From the New World, heck, it absolutely WOULD have been New World in a more just universe – but unfortunately, anime is frequently a pearls versus swine situation, and most viewers just snorted suspiciously at From the New World before wandering off to the feeding trough. Anyway, enough doom and gloom, let’s celebrate Ishihama!

Introducing the Incredible Director of the Horimiya Adaptation!

ERASED

Why It Works: Animating the Impossible, the Breathtaking Works of Kou Yoshinari

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This week, I actually took my Why It Works inspiration from an airing show, though not one I’m actually watching. It turns out Kou Yoshinari showed up to flex his incomparable animation talents on Sword Art Online, which seemed like a fine opportunity to celebrate just how impressive Yoshinari’s skills truly are. The man makes animation that no other person could create, and exemplifies the simultaneously individualist yet collaborative anime ethos, where any one artist can leave an unmistakable mark on a production. Let’s get to it!

Animating the Impossible: The Breathtaking Works of Kou Yoshinari

Why It Works: What Does It Truly Mean to Be “Over 9000?”

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I had a whole lot of fun with this week’s Why It Works article, as it fell into one of my favorite categories of criticism: thorough explorations of seemingly trivial cinematic moments. In this case, the inescapable “it’s over 9000” meme from Dragon Ball Z, a meme whose resonance and enduring nature seems to me to be a natural result of how it articulates the dramatic recalibration from the original Dragon Ball to the more self-serious Z. But enough explaining the article, let’s just get to it!

What Does It Truly Mean to Be “Over 9000?”

Why It Works: What Are Your Favorite Musical Cues in Anime?

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This week on Why It Works, I dug into the power of a great musical cue, something I personally am an absolute sucker for. Nearly all of my favorite moments in anime take strong advantage of a impactful music drop; music possesses an ability to immediately evoke an emotional state like few other art forms, and can hit us on a level that entirely bypasses conscious, reasoned response. I greatly enjoyed writing this one, and hope you have a nice time reading it too. Let’s get to it!

What Are Your Favorite Musical Cues in Anime?

Here’s Five Sights You Won’t See Anywhere But Symphogear!

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This week’s Why It Works is all about Symphogear, because it’s never a bad time to talk about Symphogear. Actually, the truth is that my recent reader-funded posts on Symphogear’s fourth season have simply reminded me how awesome and absurd this series is, and so I felt the urge to write some more general hype for this fantastic series. Let’s celebrate some of the more absurd highlights of the incomparable Symphogear!

Here’s Five Sights You Won’t See Anywhere But Symphogear!

Why It Works: Here’s Why You Absolutely Need to Catch Up on My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU!

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With the summer season nearly upon us, this week’s Why It Works ended up being unsurprisingly dedicated to singing the praises of Oregairu, one of my very favorite anime, and one of the first shows I fell in love with as someone actively writing about anime. Oregairu’s first season was excellent and second season phenomenal, and if you haven’t actually seen it, you’ve still got a few weeks left before its finale season begins. GET TO IT!

Why You Absolutely Need to Catch Up on My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU

Why It Works: What Anime Should You Check Out After Avatar: The Last Airbender?

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With the spring season largely cancelled by COVID, the anime-adjacent thing I’ve most enjoyed recently has undoubtedly been the utterly fantastic Avatar: The Last Airbender. And fortunately, with Avatar having recently gone up on Netflix, this was also the perfect time to recommend anime mirroring a variety of its many strengths. I kinda regret I didn’t fit in a “fully articulated character arcs” segment, but there’s probably only so many times I can recommend March comes in like a lion and Monogatari before someone starts yelling at me. Mushishi will have to do this time!

What Anime Should You Check Out After Avatar: The Last Airbender?