Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’m delighted to announce that this week I actually did the goddamn thing, and checked out around half a dozen of the season’s new airing anime. Gundams, shonen hits, anime-originals; you name it, I watched it (so long as your names coincide with the handful of buzz-heavy productions I actually screened). The fall season is proving to be a historically odd moment in anime production; we’re receiving a wide array of prestige productions, but the industry is in complete crisis mode in terms of staff and scheduling, meaning even some massively hyped productions are already showing cracks. We’ll likely be seeing a variety of production collapses in the weeks to come, but for now, this appears to be one of the most stacked anime seasons in years. Let’s break it down!

We’ll open with an easy feel-good reflection, on the latest season of Mob Psycho 100. Yuzuru Tachikawa’s adaptation of Mob has proven to be one of the greatest anime productions of recent history, with each season offering marvelously imaginative art design, persistently dynamic storyboards, and jaw-dropping feats of animation acumen. What’s more, all of this beautiful art is attached to a story possessing genuine emotional insight, and even some thematic complexity! Mob’s story has tackled the perils of adolescence and alienation of modern society with uncommon acuity, rising to some genuinely heart-tugging emotional peaks along the way.

Though Tachikawa’s busy schedule has seen him stepping back from the role of main director on the third season, it’s clear that the production remains in good hands. The third season’s first two episodes have already demonstrated both the visual grandeur and emotional poignancy you expect from Mob, and with the season having actually wrapped up production back in the spring, I expect things will only scale up from here. Mob Psycho is a beautiful anomaly in the modern anime landscape, that rare intersection of an ambitious rising director, a talented and well-supported staff, and source material that’s actually worthy of them. I’m delighted and just plain thankful to see it ending strong.

I also checked out the season’s most highly promoted show, Chainsaw Man. I greatly enjoyed Chainsaw Man’s first volume (you can read my thoughts on it here), but was intensely skeptical of an adaptation maintaining its tone and allure, especially once previews started coming out. Chainsaw Man in comic form feels like a savage work of outsider art, the kind of sneering, irreverent social commentary you’d expect from a zine left at the local comic shop. The adaptation style they seemed to be going with dispensed with any sort of aesthetic grittiness, reducing it to the “modern prestige shonen” style of heavy post-processing and feigned photorealism embraced by series like Jujutsu Kaisen.

The actual premiere sadly just confirmed my suspicions about the production’s art design; it’s been adapted to look a specific, generic kind of “cool” that seems to signify prestige and seriousness to modern audiences, but utterly lacks the personality of the original manga. That I probably could have lived with, but more damning was the final scene’s total reliance on a CG Chainsaw Man for its big action set piece. Currently, Land of the Lustrous is the only anime that has genuinely solved compelling CG action, and this simplified action figure model fell far, far below that standard. It was a distancing, expectation-plummeting disappointment, and also an assurance that the one thing this adaptation would presumably prioritize (action scenes) wouldn’t even look good. My biggest takeaway from this episode was “please, don’t let this adaptation dissuade you from checking out the manga.”

Then there was the newest Gundam production, The Witch From Mercury. I was a little late to the boat in checking out this one, but the frantic word of mouth promising Utena Gundam and The Tempest Gundam had me scrambling to catch up. And indeed, Mercury is absolutely both Utena and The Tempest Gundam, along with a charming and energetic story in its own right.

Though he’s written some stinkers, Ichiro Okouchi remains one of my favorite writers working in anime. Even in his lesser works, the man just goes for it, embracing a creativity and ambition of plotting that sets him alongside very few writers in anime’s frustratingly conservative modern era. Additionally, while his choices of twists and whatnot may sometimes be misguided, he understands fundamentals of narrative design and characterization that ensure all of his works possess a substance of form and character, setting his story’s baselines well above most adapted manga and light novels. Thirdly, he actually writes stories that are about things right from the start, embracing the promise of stories as holistic vehicles for grand themes and self-reflective sagas, rather than just continued episodic installments.

So far, The Witch From Mercury is embodying all the virtues attendant to this tier of anime writing, using the convenient bones of its Utena-adapted episodic structure to flesh out its cast and intriguing new world, while capping off each episode with a generous flourish of traditionally animated robot action. Sadly, the production on this one was unhealthy from the start, and the show is already starting to show some cracks in terms of its visual design and composite. I’m seriously rooting for The Witch From Mercury, and will definitely be keeping with it, but I suspect we’ll be ending up with some dicey-looking episodes down the line.

I then checked out Do It Yourself!!, which has so far served as this season’s “insider hype” production, being greatly anticipated by folks who actually know something about anime production staff. The first episode was indeed brimming with aesthetic creativity, from its beautiful pastel backgrounds to its irrepressibly expressive heroines. The episode was endlessly laudable in terms of its visual design, but to be honest, I had a tough time engaging with its full-on iyashikei tonal stylings. 

Heroine Yui just felt too abstracted away from human experience for me to engage with her feelings, while the show’s humor was too gentle and simplified to ever make me laugh. It’s a rare iyashikei that truly grabs me; I generally need some element of the production to feel genuinely relatable or poignant to me, whether that’s through characterization, conceptual hooks, or whatever else it may be. Do It Yourself!! didn’t really offer that for me, so I found myself checking my watch during this premiere, and will likely be dropping it here.

And finally, yes, of course, there was Bleach. Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War, in fact, which roared out of the gate in an incredibly luxurious coat of paint. Director Tomohisa Taguchi has drenched Bleach’s newest saga in lighting and post-production sheen, offering dramatic shading and glimmering neon saturation to basically every moment of character posturing. And considering this is friggin’ Bleach, that amounts to basically three quarters of the production so far. Bleach has always most principally been a vehicle for characters standing in groups and making cool poses, and Taguchi’s style seems like a perfect fit for elevating such moments.

Sadly, it’s still Bleach, which means the story is just “a bunch of new bad guys have come out of nowhere and attacked, go get ‘em!” Additionally, while Taguchi’s style feels quite at home with Bleach’s priorities, it’s also profoundly labor-intensive, and ill-suited to moments of actual character movement. Given the production isn’t exactly brimming with excess talent, I expect the other shoe to drop in short order, and can’t imagine we’ll be receiving anything like the Hueco Mundo highlights of the original Bleach. Still, Bleach is an easy watch that offers my whole house a wave of adolescent nostalgia; we’ll probably be riding this train until it tumbles off the tracks.

That covers my viewings, but simply announcing this article incurred me half a dozen or so shouts of “WHERE’S BOCCHI,” so you can look forward to a Bocchi Addendum next week. See you next time!