It’s Wednesday my dudes. Three weeks into the spring season, I’ve at last more or less “caught up,” and solidified the list of shows I’ll definitely be sticking with. As of now, I’m set on My Hero Academia, Megalo Box, Hinamatsuri, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, with Wotakoi currently on the bubble. I’m pretty darn happy with that list – it’d be nice to have a more dedicated character drama like After the Rain, or a rich message piece like Gatchaman Crowds, but I have very few complaints with the four I’m sold on, and there’s a stacked bench waiting if I feel inclined to pick up Persona 5 or something. Megalo Box might be the only true stunner this season, but there are plenty of very solid shows just behind it, and I’m having a great time on the whole. Let’s catch up with some cartoons and run this week down!

The students of Class 1-A embarked on their summer training this week, which allowed this week’s episode of My Hero Academia to offer one more of those perpetually entertaining medleys of all the kids exercising their quirks. My Hero Academia’s fights are great, and its emotional core is resonant as hell, but it also benefits greatly from the fact that watching these students brainstorm new ways to employ their powers is an inherently crunchy, tactically satisfying experience. On top of that, in spite of being more or less a training episode, Rie Matsumoto herself stepped by to take a turn as episode director, offering a light sprinkling of the gorgeous compositions that make all her works so special. Academia can at times suffer from a restrictively panel-by-panel approach to adaptation, so having Matsumoto add a sense of intimacy to the meal preparation scenes and grandeur to the purpose-of-heroes scenes made for a terrific upgrade. See, it’s not so hard to make a great shounen adaptation, all you have to do is get one of the best living directors to step in and guest-direct all the episodes.

Meanwhile, Megalo Box offered another unconditional masterpiece of an episode this week, putting it at three for three on top-notch action entertainment. In spite of the first episode or two theoretically being the ones where the staff get to show off and the animation is most rich, I actually preferred this episode’s loose, character-focused animation to the first two’s dramatic, pose-focused fight shots. That style shift was an excellent choice for this episode’s focus, giving Sachio and his friends a natural sense of vitality, and even making our hero Junk Dog (or I guess Joe at this point) feel that much more vulnerable and approachable. And of course, there was plenty of the gorgeous background art, great music, and vivid compositions to elevate one more chapter of this fundamentally sturdy boxing fable. Megalo Box is proudly archetypal in its narrative, letting the confidence and overwhelming personality of its execution give its story weight. So far, it’s succeeded brilliantly in that every single episode, and I’m eager to see how this production will dazzle us next.

I also found the time to catch up on Hinamatsuri this week, and am very glad I did. Hinamatsuri’s first episode was an excellent mix of very funny comedy and charming character-focused stuff, but it’s easy for comedies to essentially run out of ideas after a great premiere. Fortunately, as a comedy, Hinamatsuri’s strengths are far more fundamental than any single great gag. The show just understands the timing demands of comedy far better than most anime; its jokes are snappy and almost never oversold, and the precision with which it pulls off simple gags of conversational tempo is really incredible. On top of that, the second and third episodes both successfully built up the show’s appeal as a found-family drama, with Anzu and Hina’s variant forms of quiet desperation each cutting to the heart in their own way. There’s an unexpected poignancy and sharpness to this show, and the masterful direction means neither the comedy nor the drama undercut the other. I’m happy it’s turned into such an unexpected success!

The second and third episodes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes weren’t as astonishing craft-wise as some others, but the show remains extremely sturdy in all respects. The second episode felt like a tiny movie unto itself, pulling off a hyper-condensed heroic origin story for Yang Wen-li and concluding the first battle on an unexpected anticlimax. Galactic Heroes likely suffers the most for its methodical pacing here at the start, where Yang and Reinhard are testing each other out, and their associates are still relying on incredibly dated battle strategies. The appeal of these battles is fundamentally akin to the appeal of stuff like Lelouch’s schemes from Code Geass, but stripped of Geass’s speed, bombast, and tactical magic, I could easily see Heroes’ drama possessing much narrower appeal. That’s not really a “flaw,” though – I personally really enjoyed these episodes, and am totally on board with the methodical pacing necessary to make a story this ambitious work. Galactic Heroes’ narrative feels naturally iconic, and its execution is generally polished, so I’m mostly just hoping this adaptation makes it through to the end.

Sadly, Wotakoi’s second episode turned out to be a massive step down from the first in a couple ways. First off, the pacing of this episode both in terms of its overarching narrative and mid-joke comedic timing felt incredibly lethargic. Wotakoi lacks the aesthetic chops to conjure a convincing sense of atmosphere, so when it spends multiple minutes on something like Nifuji slowly getting ready for work, that’s basically just dead air. Even worse was the timing for the jokes, which were all stretched out far past the point of comedy, and which mostly centered on tired “framing real life events like game events” conceits anyway. And on top of that, Nifuji and Hana also just felt significantly less like adults in this episode, and more like young teens – the first half’s “now that we’re dating, things are awkward” concept could easily have been tweaked to feel relevant to adults, but it felt more like kids in their first relationship. On the whole, it looks like Wotakoi is unfortunately trending into the same place Real Girl landed – it’s a Me show in content, but not strong enough in execution to hold my interest. And with Hinamatsuri turning out to be a pretty great character story in its own right, it seems like Wotakoi’s days are numbered.