Today I wrote up Imaishi’s latest, which was very him and also potentially reflective of maybe a little emotional nuance coming somewhere down the line. Luluco was an extremely messy show, but its best bits were good in ways that make it pretty distinct, and at five minutes an episode, it certainly didn’t waste anybody’s time. A reasonable short all around.
You can check out my full review over at ANN.
It’s almost painful to read these chapters, knowing how close I am to the current stopping point, knowing how uncertain it is this arc will ever be concluded. So much of this reads like a fantasy dreamland idea of a Hunter x Hunter arc. Kurapika and Leorio are back, and they’re both relevant! Ging and Pariston are dueling on the sidelines! Biscuit and Cheadle are there too! It’s all too much happiness for one Hunter x Hunter fan to take in – the joy tempered by the cruel fact of Togashi’s terribly uneven health. I hope he finds some rest for his own sake. I can live with just these treasures.
As Planetes’ seventh episode begins, Hachi explains how the moon is often used as a place of recuperation for those suffering from the effects of long-term space habitation. With his leg still broken from his prior adventures, Hachi has plenty of time with his own thoughts this week, and so we hear his internal voice for the very first time. Hachi meets a pair of new acquaintances during his time recovering, as well – an old astronaut named Harry Roland, who spent twenty years in space carving the way for the current era, and a young woman named Nono, who claims to have been on the moon for twelve years. Both of these are dramatic stretches of time; the human body isn’t naturally suited for space travel, and so both Harry and Nono are something of space oddities, stranded from humanity’s terrestrial home.
Halfway through this episode, Nitori arrives at her sister’s classroom in order to drop off a lunchbox. Her sister’s classmates stare at Nitori, noting how she’s cute and “looks like a girl,” and Nitori actually blushes in happiness at this. But Nitori’s sister is not impressed – she pushes Nitori out and then stomps to her desk. “Don’t take it out on your lunch,” a male friend gently chides her, at which Nitori’s sister only scowls, and then slams her lunch repeatedly into the table.
Welp, looks like it’s time for the second wave of new summer premieres. This one’s a pretty questionable crop, frankly – sweetness & lightning is fantastic and Cheer Boys!! is perfectly reasonable, but outside of that, we’re looking at a whole bunch of middling-to-poor genre pieces without all that much to distinguish them. There are still a fair number of premieres to come, but things are looking a little dire at the two-thirds point this time. But hey, you get to read my increasingly despairing reviews either way, so, good deal!
I mean, you and I know the answer to that. But The Lost Village’s style is awesome and unique and very worth digging into, and so today I’ve got a huge friggin’ article exploring the specific nature of The Lost Village’s charms. I loved this show, and I had a ton of fun talking about it here. The craft of comedy is just really fascinating in general, and I’m sure I’ll return to it again at some time. But for now, let’s just celebrate the glory of Lovepon and Friends one more time.
Is The Lost Village Actually A Comedy?
That’s pretty much the plot of Nana’s second episode. We’re in flashback territory now, as we learn about the end of Nana’s high school life and the beginning of her time at art school. She falls in love, is rejected, falls in love, is ignored, falls in love, is forgotten, and finally falls in love with someone who’s actually interested in her. Unfortunately, her eventual “boyfriend’s” interest is of a pretty limited and predatory type – the man she falls for is married, and he is only willing to meet with her for sex a few times a month. Nana is being used, but as a naive and love-struck high school student, she doesn’t have much recourse.
Preview week has begun in earnest, and I am dead. The season actually feels pretty frontloaded this time – Orange and Love Live Sunshine have already both confirmed my hype, and DAYS has shown up as an unexpected new challenger. There’s also the usual scattering of mediocre-to-abysmal shows out there, but hey, every medium is mostly crap. It already seems like this season will have a handful of shows worth keeping up with, and that’s good enough for me!
“They say her voice was as beautiful as that of a goddess.” That’s one of the few things Amano learns about Rika, the woman who supposedly tied her own stepmother to the clock’s face. What would lead a person to do that, and what her own thoughts might have been… all of this can only be inferred, refracted through secondary sources with their own ambiguous motives. All pictures of her were burned, and now she exists only as a distant wraith in the background of a single photo, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of feminine hysteria.
Today I went back to check out one of the very first shows I covered for ANN, Shonen Hollywood. The show definitely held up; Shohari is almost uniquely pointed in its approach to the idol industry, and even though its aesthetics are pretty crap all around, the writing is good enough that it’s still definitely worth a watch. I’m glad writing for ANN has given me the chance to branch out and discover shows like this, that I may never have found on my own time.
You can check out my full review over at ANN!
