Welp, the title kinda covers it, right? BONES’ upcoming film Josee looks phenomenal in basically every regard, so it was a no-brainer to write a rundown of its many production assets, and hopefully get a few more people excited about this delicate-looking romance. We’ve actually got a bunch of interesting film projects coming, but Josee is high among them, and I’m eager to see it for myself. Here’s the piece!
Here’s Why You Should Be Excited for Josee, the Tiger and the Fish!
For this week’s Why It Works, I discussed anime’s laudable focus on atmospheric storytelling, and its ability to convey emotional truths or the precise tension of a moment through careful scene-setting. This also serves as a general “becoming a more active media consumer” lesson, as I once more encourage people to connect with art in ways aside from the purely plot-focused. I’ve come to accept I probably won’t singlehandedly instigate a sea change in how fandom engages with art, but I think I’m okay with encouraging just a few people to think just a little differently about storytelling. Anyway, let’s get to it!
One Perfect Moment – Atmosphere as Drama in Anime
Heck yeah, writing about Doremi on Crunchyroll. I’d likely never have gotten the chance if not for this upcoming film, so count that as another reason I’m so excited this revival project exists. Beyond that, this article is more generally about how children’s anime tends to actually inhabit a more mature, thoughtful perspective than late-night anime, largely because it’s written to help kids grow, rather than to make teens feel badass. Let’s get to it!
Ojamajo Doremi and the Magic of Children’s Animation
Initially, Kouko’s demand that Fuuta relive his past lives must have felt like a kind of divine punishment. Dragged out of his happy, oblivious adolescent experience, he has been forced to experience hardship after hardship, carrying the suffering of multiple lives on his own shoulders. Fuuta’s past lives don’t even possess the decency to merely lurk in memory; they surge upwards at the most inopportune times, tainting his current experiences with the stifling taste of old, unfulfilled grudges and regrets. Thanks to Kouko, Fuuta carries his past with him always, living with one foot dragging through a mist of half-forgotten sentiment.
For this week’s Why It Works, I leapfrogged off Ninny’s absolutely fantastic hair from Burn the Witch, in order to discuss the nature and importance of character designs more generally. I don’t often focus too much on characters’ fashion choices in my critiques, but I have a great deal of respect for the difficult craft of character design, and Tite Kubo has always been one of the best when it comes to designing stylish characters. Let’s get to it!
Fabulous Hair, and Other Character Design Fundamentals
This week in Why It Works, I capitalized on Halloween’s approach to write a general article about how tricky it is to make animation scary, and what tools of the medium you can use to alleviate that inherent obstacle. It’s difficult to make an audience scared of an animated monster, but it’s certainly possible to make the audience feel trapped, and from there they’ll frequently do the work themselves. Let’s get to it!
What Are the Fundamentals of Great Horror Anime?
For this actual week’s Why It Works post, I ended up writing an article I’ve been meaning to write for years, and gushing a whole lot about how Breath of the Wild fundamentally changed open world game design. We’re already seeing a variety of new games that move the genre away from the prevailing Ubisoft model, and I could not be happier about it. Let’s get to it!
The World is the Game: Designing Worlds After Breath of the Wild
This week (well, last week, technically), I ended up springboarding off the Horimiya anime announcement to ramble about Masashi Ishihama. Ishihama is one of the industry’s unsung greats, so I’m always happy for an excuse to celebrate his catalog, and pray once more that his next work is the one that breaks him big. It should have been From the New World, heck, it absolutely WOULD have been New World in a more just universe – but unfortunately, anime is frequently a pearls versus swine situation, and most viewers just snorted suspiciously at From the New World before wandering off to the feeding trough. Anyway, enough doom and gloom, let’s celebrate Ishihama!
Introducing the Incredible Director of the Horimiya Adaptation!
This week, I actually took my Why It Works inspiration from an airing show, though not one I’m actually watching. It turns out Kou Yoshinari showed up to flex his incomparable animation talents on Sword Art Online, which seemed like a fine opportunity to celebrate just how impressive Yoshinari’s skills truly are. The man makes animation that no other person could create, and exemplifies the simultaneously individualist yet collaborative anime ethos, where any one artist can leave an unmistakable mark on a production. Let’s get to it!
Animating the Impossible: The Breathtaking Works of Kou Yoshinari
I had a whole lot of fun with this week’s Why It Works article, as it fell into one of my favorite categories of criticism: thorough explorations of seemingly trivial cinematic moments. In this case, the inescapable “it’s over 9000” meme from Dragon Ball Z, a meme whose resonance and enduring nature seems to me to be a natural result of how it articulates the dramatic recalibration from the original Dragon Ball to the more self-serious Z. But enough explaining the article, let’s just get to it!
What Does It Truly Mean to Be “Over 9000?”
