Alright folks, you know it’s time for Bloom Into You. As the season moves towards its endgame, we find ourselves approaching an inevitable clash between the rapidly diverging desires of Yuu and Touko. For Yuu, the last several episodes have seen her undergo a profound shift in how she views both Touko and herself. She can no longer affect the nonchalant, flirtatious person who once effortlessly sparred with Touko – having actually developed strong feelings for her senpai, she is now hyper-aware of Touko’s every movement, and increasingly unsatisfied with their romantic stasis. Meanwhile, challenges to Touko’s desire to replace her sister seem to have only hardened her own resolve. While misinterpreting Yuu’s newfound self-consciousness as a pushback against her own affection, she moves ever closer to fulfilling her sister’s role in the play, and thus completing her last wish. But what comes after she’s already done all the things her sister pursued? And will Yuu’s feelings even remain repressed that long? We’ve got plenty of thorny drama to look forward to as we explore another episode of this terrific show!
Author Archives: Bobduh
Winter 2019 – Week 11 in Review
Closing time is approaching, friends. With only one real week left in the winter season, all my seasonal contenders were wrapping things up for the endgame this week, offering a mix of climactic battles and shocking reveals and various other animated delights. The Magnificent Kotobuki sent like five hundred goddamn planes into the air to blow each other up, while Kemurikusa finally unveiled the true nature of its world, and Run with the Wind simply maintained its signature excellence. It was a week of winter 2019, in short, and I’m happy to move beyond the general vagueries and get down to the details with you all. Let’s run down one more week in anime!
Why It Works: Cowboy Bebop’s Shinichiro Watanabe is Directing an Anime this Spring!
Today on Why It Works, I used the occasion of Carole & Tuesday’s upcoming release to talk about Watanabe’s work in a more general sense, highlighting the themes and narrative quirks that have remained consistent all through his many years as a director. I get the feeling my insistence his works are all a part of one cohesive statement might not tempt people who are just hoping for Bebop 2, but I gotta try! Regardless, I enjoyed looking and thinking back over Watanabe’s career, and now feel even more excited for his new show. I hope you enjoy the piece!
Cowboy Bebop’s Shinichiro Watanabe is Directing an Anime this Spring!
Chihayafuru Part Two: The Movie
I’ll get the bad news out of the way right from the start: the second Chihayafuru film is not that great of an actual film. If I were giving it a formal review, I’d probably spend a fair amount of time talking about how its first act hangs on insubstantial drama, as well as its inability to maintain the manga’s tactical sports intrigue, which generally acts as a needed counterbalance to the story’s melodrama. I’d praise Mayu Matsuoka for absolutely killing it as Shinobu, but reflect that ultimately, in spite of doing its best to reconstitute the manga into a coherent three-film structure, it loses too much of the original’s appeal in the process. I’d conclude by summarizing it as not a great film in its own right, but a very fun lark for fans of the franchise, and a fascinating exercise in the difficulty of translating ongoing manga to discrete films.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s – Episode 2
Hello folks, and welcome to another friggin’ episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha! I’ve been having a lovely time with this series, and I hope you have as well – in addition to filling out an important gap in my history-of-anime knowledge, it’s also just been a very fun, aesthetically compelling show in its own right. It always bears repeating that few creative ideas truly come from nowhere – all creators are reprocessing and reflecting the works that inspired them, and thus engaging with Nanoha has naturally enriched my understanding of works like Madoka Magica, Symphogear, and modern interpretations of magical girl drama as a whole. And considering Wrong Every Time has not-so-subtly transformed into some kind of magical girl appreciation blog (shoutouts to Precure, Doremi, and Princess Tutu), it’s probably a good thing that I’m finally investigating one of the modern titans of the genre.
So far, the transition into Nanoha’s second season has come with a variety of aesthetic consequences. The shift from Akiyuki Shinbo to Keizo Kusakawa has been accompanied by a general consolidation of the Nanoha aesthetic, with fewer of the striking two-tone compositions Shinbo favors, but plenty of generally evocative symmetrical compositions. The show’s ostentatious post-processing work and focus on mechanical transformations remain intact, but the introduction of an antagonist who actually combines magic with physical strikes has lent the battles a newfound sense of physical weight, along with more animation flourishes. To be honest, that first episode fight was probably the best-composed battle of the franchise so far, and I’m excited to see Fate herself take the stage. Let’s dive into another episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha!
Winter 2019 – Week 10 in Review
This was not the greatest week in anime, I am afraid to report. All the shows I’m watching that are apparently capable of weaker episodes ended up producing one, with JoJo in particular offering what was almost certainly the worst Golden Wind episode so far. Fortunately, even if all the stragglers faltered this week, both Mob Psycho 100 and Run with the Wind excelled with their usual grace, offering an encouraging counterpoint to their so-so compatriots. Pretty cool that for this season, even a particularly lousy week of anime still offers some of the best spectacles of the year!
Why It Works: We Are Stronger Together in Run with the Wind!
With last week’s article having covered the overall “here’s what this show does well” pitch, this week’s Why It Works offers a more traditionally Wrong Every Time take on Run with the Wind, as we explore the themes and emotional experience of the show. I really enjoyed writing this piece, and hope you enjoy reading it too!
We Are Stronger Together in Run with the Wind!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episode 7
Throughout its early episodes, Neon Genesis Evangelion has taken care to impress upon us the scale of this conflict, and the necessity of an organization like NERV. As I’ve previously discussed, apocalyptic scifi like this can have a tendency to feel pretty myopic in its scale – there are these heroes and these villains, but the concept of a greater world hanging in the balance can feel dramatically distant. Through conceits like the army’s initial failure in episode one, and the collaborative efforts of all Japan in six, Evangelion has consistently reminded us that humanity has truly been pushed to the edge, and that NERV really is our last line of defense. And here in episode seven, we receive the most stark indicator yet that NERV is truly humanity’s final barricade – as they scramble to defend that title, in light of a direct challenge by professional rivals.
Ojamajo Doremi – Episode 51
Well folks, the moment has arrived. After fifty diverse and rewarding episodes of Ojamajo Doremi, and one climactic stab at the final witch exams, we have at last arrived at the end of Doremi’s first season. The things I’ve enjoyed about this season feel too numerous to list, but we’re at the dang finale now, and I think some pomp and circumstance is probably appropriate.
First off, I’ve come to absolutely love this main cast, with all four of our heroines surprising and impressing me over time. As is appropriate, Doremi started as the most helplessly ojamajo of any of them, and yet has probably undergone the most growth as well. Doremi started this series kindhearted and motivated, but very often petty and rash, as well as lacking in a personal passion she could take pride in. She can still be petty and rash, but her developing progress as a witch has forced her to challenge her own feelings, step back from the spotlight when necessary, and ultimately gain both the confidence and skill to apply herself and positively change the world through her mastery of witchcraft. The World’s Unluckiest Pretty Girl has grown into a genuine hero, and it’s been wonderful to witness.
Of course, Ojamajo Doremi has always been an ensemble production, and its illustration of Doremi’s friends and family have offered some of its most poignant, thoughtful, and emotionally instructive tales. Aiko’s process of coming to terms with her parents’ divorce, as she grapples with the distance between her and her father’s feelings, clings to the memory of her old home life, and ultimately learns to assert her needs without retreating into the past. Hadzuki quietly demonstrating she’s actually the weirdest of the three of them, proving herself equally suited to absurd kidnapping capers and somber meditations on death and the limits of our strength. Onpu finding the intimacy her family withheld in the camaraderie of her peers, and the trust of her closest friends. And all their various families and classmates and mentors and friends, who through their stories have collectively rung out that whatever your passion, if you embrace it with a positive spirit, it is worth celebrating.
That, in the end, may be our heroines’ saving grace. All through this season, characters have hidden the passions they love, often using them as a stand-in for the feelings they’re repressing as well. Their ultimate celebration of those passions has often echoed their celebration of those feelings, be it Masaru’s memory of playing trumpet with his father, Mutsumi’s determination to become a pro wrestler, or whatever else they most secretly and earnestly feel. Here in the last episode, the greatest secret of all is on full display – but at this point, Doremi and her friends have become such talented, laudable witches that perhaps that’s not such a big deal. However this season resolves, I feel privileged and delighted to explore one more episode with you all. Let’s watch some Ojamajo Doremi!
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s – Episode 1
Hello all, and welcome back to another episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha! What, did you think we were finished? Of course not! Influential as its first season may already be, Nanoha wouldn’t be half the institution it now is if it weren’t such an, er, actual institution. The franchise has been receiving new sequels and spinoffs and manga adaptations ever since 2004, making it a fairly unique property within the late night anime sphere. Most long-running shows fall into either children’s anime or shounen adaptation territory, which are always intended to have lengthy and largely episodic running times. Nanoha bucks this trend, adding seasons and properties piecemeal across scattered seasons, kept alive by its own enduring popularity. So what is Nanoha’s second season about, then?
No clue. Pretty much everything I already knew about Nanoha happened in the first season – the combination of magical girl and scifi influences, the clash between Fate and Nanoha, and the ultimate friendship they develop. All I can really say at the moment is that even the context of the first season makes it no surprise this series got a continuation. Nanoha’s first season certainly possessed its own self-contained narrative, but so much of its running time was dedicated to establishing its evocative techno-fantasy world that it also felt like the prologue to something greater. “We must defeat Testarossa” didn’t feel like a meaningful capstone to the world they’d established; it was just Nanoha’s first assignment, and was treated as such. Having established this rich world, underlined Nanoha’s unique strength within it, and just recently yanked Fate over to the light side, the pieces are all set for a thrilling sequel that takes advantage of the original’s careful expository work. Let’s see what awaits us in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s!