The anime was pretty darn great this week, folks. First off, I settled into an actual watch schedule, which comes out to… well, all of the same stuff I was watching last week. I tried to pick up Hanebado! again, but to be honest, in a year where I’ve been spamming episodes of Chihayafuru nearly every week, it’s really hard to appreciate a show that’s so much worse at sports drama. When the show tried to dip into its trauma drama I pretty much instantly thought “can’t we just fast forward to the cool matches,” and it was at this point that I realized I wasn’t treating the show fairly enough to genuinely engage with it. “If you’re not enjoying something, just watch something else – you will not learn anything critically by continuing to watch it, you’ll just feed your own sense of superiority” is a lesson I’ve tried hard to internalize lately, and I might as well put it into practice here.

Fortunately, while Hanebado! was a bust, Angolmois actually stepped up enough this week that I feel happy continuing it, meaning I’ve got a pretty sturdy schedule. My list is still perilously low on compelling character dramas, but compelling character dramas are just not something anime is willing to give me every season, to my eternal dismay. Until we can bottle and mass produce Nisio Isin stories, I think that’s just a truth I’m going to have to live with – in the meantime, let’s survey what we’ve got and RUN THIS WEEK DOWN!

This week’s My Hero Academia fell victim to the big issue I was concerned about last week: the difficulty of adapting an arc largely constructed around epic two-page spreads into animation without everything feeling a little stiff. Sequences like Yoarashi’s 120-enemy massacre, which originally dazzled through their imposing visual scale and detailed linework, don’t naturally translate to equally dazzling fluid movement, and so this episode’s impact suffered as a result. That said, anime is also a game of resource management, and the choice to make the episode mostly focused on Deku’s run-in with Camie a more conservative one was probably correct. There are a lot of ambitious fights still ahead in this arc, and this particular sub-sequence of those fights didn’t really demand all that much animation. Plus, in actual narrative terms, everything happening here is pretty great – the rapid-fire introduction of new rivals with new powers has been a total thrill, and it’s also tremendously rewarding to see the entirety of 1-A collaborating and demonstrating both new powers and a greater confidence on the field.

I mentioned last week how I was disappointed that Angolmois couldn’t maintain the animation of its first episode, and also that it was pretty much on the borderline of being dropped as a result. Well, this episode didn’t really convince me that was a fluke, but I think I’m sticking around anyway. While this episode was certainly less still-reliant than the second one, it still didn’t really offer any noteworthy animation highlights – but on the other hand, it was also a well-paced piece of action storytelling from start to finish, keeping energy high and moving through its classic war story beats with unflinching confidence. Angolmois’ narrative composition, character archetypes, and whatnot are all relatively familiar, but it’s telling this story with uncommon polish and a full understanding of its own appeal. There are no gimmicky characters or tension-destroying gags holding it down, and Kuuchi himself is an entertaining yet convincingly human protagonist. Angolmois isn’t a messy show elevated by highlights – it’s a reasonable action-adventure with no weaknesses, demonstrating that fundamentally strong storytelling is the bedrock of audience investment. I might not be dazzled by Angolmois, but it’s a story I’m happy to spend some time with every week.

Planet With continued to upend all pacing expectations this week, barreling through the third act “enemies team up to fight a greater foe” and even the theoretically finale-ready “hero is swallowed by their power and most be saved by their friends” sequences without stopping for breath. Of course, Planet With isn’t simply being surprising for the sake of being surprising – it’s just not wasting time, and is confident that its audience will keep up as it stampedes through the classic motions of its genre.

Planet With also isn’t really “sending up” giant robot staples or anything; it’s clearly, earnestly committed to its own narrative, and its love for stories like this even bleeds through into the characters themselves. “We have to believe in impossible dreams because impossible dreams are all we have” is a theme that basically kills me every time, and hearing that directly articulated by two of our heroes gives me great confidence that Planet With is making purposeful use of its own genre awareness. Really, with a show like this, the preeminence of authorial voice is one of the main appeals – from the oddly anachronistic mix of genre tropes (early 00s fanservice and also characters standing on the shoulders of their own robots?) to the resolutely weird and heartfelt storytelling, it’s easy to see Mizukami’s personality in this work, particularly compared to many of the market-designed light novel adaptations we get these days. Planet With is poignant and propulsive and endlessly creative, and I’m thrilled to see where it leads.

Revue Starlight accomplished two critically important things this week, as well as one somewhat less-important but still very welcome thing. First off, this episode was full of small incidental scenes between unexpected character pairs that went a great distance to humanize the overall class. Though its focus characters were theoretically Claudine and Futaba, there were effective minor moments with a good half dozen members of the main cast, which all solidified the personalities and dynamics of the leads in their own ways. On top of that, this show’s central conflict, the falling out of Tendo and Claudine, was based in clearly parsible and sympathetic goals. The show’s articulation of what it means to be the “Top Star” has been fairly vague so far (actual real-life revue implications aside), but this episode framed that goal in the context of personal ambition versus friendship, which gave it a far clearer dramatic significance. Given this episode echoed that conflict across three separate sets of individual characters, it seems safe to assume that the show overall is genuinely invested in the sacrifices and loneliness of fame, which gives me something far more substantial to care about in turn.

Aside from that welcome elevation and contrasting of both characterization and theme, this episode also succeeded because it was friggin’ gorgeous. It couldn’t quite match the first episode, but that’s a hollow complaint – Revue’s first episode was absurd, and this episode still managed to bring back that mix of evocative daytime layouts and gorgeous, visually ambitious fight scenes. Revue Starlight is still looking to be the event of the season.