Aaand here’s my other late review, of another Polygon-Nihei combination. Blame! certainly wasn’t a great film, but it was still an enjoyable experience, and most importantly, it absolutely maintained the appeal of the comic. Certainly worth a watch.
After the Rain – Review
This one’s from last week, but I was rushing so much to do other writing then that I never reposted it here. Anyway! I reviewed After the Rain, the best show of last season (or so I thought until finally catching up on Evergarden). It was very good, for a variety of reasons. Here are those reasons for you:
Why It Works: Hinamatsuri’s Comedic Timing
It unsurprisingly didn’t take long for Hinamatsuri to pop up in my Why It Works columns. The show’s pretty much a comedy marvel in all respects, and also very endearing as a found-family drama besides, making it basically the ideal show for a huge mark like me. The fact that its jokes generally aren’t that surprising only really underlines the strength of their delivery; pacing really can work wonders, and it’s certainly working wonders here. I hope you enjoy the piece!
Hinamatsuri’s Comedic Timing is So Snappy It’ll Break Your Neck
ef – A Tale of Memories – Episode 11
Let’s roll on into the next ef – A Tale of Memories! There’s usually a pretty significant break on my end between watching these episodes, but right now I’m carrying on the momentum from yesterday’s writeup and rushing right into episode eleven. The show’s last episode didn’t feature the Chihiro-Renji story at all, and instead focused on resolving a great deal of Hiro’s conflicts. Having slept with Miyako and been confronted by Rei, Hiro was finally forced to make a definitive choice about his life course. Ultimately, while acknowledging he really had loved Kei in the past, he chose to actually pursue Miyako.
This choice fits perfectly in line with ef’s overall heart-on-sleeve infatuation with living for your art, and turning yourself into a monument to creativity. While Rei consistently urged moderation and making sure to balance his work and school life, Miyako was absolutely ready to join him in self-immolating for some wild ideal. I frankly don’t think picking Miyako was the healthy choice for Hiro, as not only is Miyako herself an incredibly unstable person, but Hiro has already demonstrated that pushing too hard in his career has left him burnt out and exhausted. But Miyako is still probably the “right” choice for this story, which overall takes an extremely romantic view of the artist’s plight. And the actual evocation of Hiro’s choice was one of the show’s standout moments so far, a thrilling mix of well-built character turns and evocative aesthetic tricks. Of course, we’ve still got two episodes left and a sequel besides, so I can’t imagine Hiro and Miyako have reached any sort of happily ever after quite yet. Let’s see what episode eleven brings!
Chihayafuru S2 – Episode 7
It’s time for more Chihayafuru, ya knuckleheads! With the regional team tournament now complete, the doors are open for this episode to prioritize basically any drama it wants to. Just like how the regional tournament last year was the moment that fully integrated Tsutomu into the group, the last scene of our last episode seemed to imply that both Hanano and Tsukuba are now invested in the team for genuinely karuta-related reasons, and no longer simply hanging around to achieve their own peripheral goals. That means it could easily be time to begin Hanano’s competitive arc, where we establish her style of play and explicate more karuta fundamentals through training, but we could just as easily leap straight from the regional to national tournament, and keep up the focus on our main team. After the satisfying but almost exhausting run of matches at regionals, I’d actually be fine with an episode that slows down a little, but Chihayafuru has never been one to slow its roll. Let’s dive right into one more episode of Chihayafuru!
Princess Tutu – Episode 6
Princess Tutu’s sixth episode opens with a new fable, a story about a princess trapped in an eternal sleep. The story is a familiar one; Sleeping Beauty, the tale of the princess Aurora and her noble savior. But in this version, when a young man arrives to wake Aurora, a voice whispers “awaken the princess from her sleep? What a cruel thing to do. Is the princess not wishing for the kiss of awakening, but rather to continue to sleep forever?”
Spring 2018 – Week 3 in Review
It’s Wednesday my dudes. Three weeks into the spring season, I’ve at last more or less “caught up,” and solidified the list of shows I’ll definitely be sticking with. As of now, I’m set on My Hero Academia, Megalo Box, Hinamatsuri, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, with Wotakoi currently on the bubble. I’m pretty darn happy with that list – it’d be nice to have a more dedicated character drama like After the Rain, or a rich message piece like Gatchaman Crowds, but I have very few complaints with the four I’m sold on, and there’s a stacked bench waiting if I feel inclined to pick up Persona 5 or something. Megalo Box might be the only true stunner this season, but there are plenty of very solid shows just behind it, and I’m having a great time on the whole. Let’s catch up with some cartoons and run this week down!
Why It Works: The Anime-Original Secrets of My Hero Academia
Today on Crunchyroll, I focused on precisely the kind of nitty-gritty craft stuff that makes me so happy to have this column, exploring how the added content for My Hero Academia’s new season reflected the overall authorial voice of the show versus the manga. Obviously they didn’t include any overbearing new foreshadowing or anything, but the way My Hero Academia The Show sees its own cast is interesting to me, and material that diverges from the manga is one of the clearest avenues for exploring that perspective. This was a fun one to write, and I hope you enjoy it!
The Anime-Original Secrets of My Hero Academia
Flip Flappers – Episode 11
Flipflap has been destroyed! Mimi has revealed herself! The end is nigh! With three episodes left to go, it appears that Flip Flappers is already barreling towards the finish line. So what bombshells are dropped in this, Flip Flappers’ second-from-penultimate episode!?!
Well, mostly a bunch of sad stories from long ago. Though we open with the direct aftermath of last episode’s Mimi reveal, the better part of this episode is spent elaborating on the shared history of Mimi, Papika, and Salt, giving us context for both the modern Flipflap organization and their nefarious nemeses. As with the last episode, this context often feels dramatically rushed, and the show’s structural messiness continues to add a sense of “and then this happened” shapelessness to the dramatic proceedings. We’ve reached the point where characters don’t necessarily exist in a shared physical reality so much as they inhabit a shared dramatic space, and thus characters like Salt will jump from vaguely defined location to vaguely defined location in whichever way the narrative demands.
Ojamajo Doremi – Episode 27
We return at last to Ojamajo Doremi! It’s been a little while since I spent time with these ojamajos in the real world, and I am beyond happy to return. This is my first Doremi post of 2018, a year that I’m hoping will somehow turn around the global inferno that was 2017, but considering this year started by the heat dying in my apartment followed by a blizzard sealing me in my apartment, I’m not entirely optimistic.
Enter Doremi as a ray of sunshine, a show that’s still charming and well-crafted and full of heart no matter how bad things are out there. Doremi’s last episode saw the show seemingly jumping subgenres entirely, as the introduction of “bad items” and “bad cards” offered Doremi a dash of Card Captor Sakura. I’m not yet sure what to make of Doremi and her friends being dubbed Pureleine card-hunters – I generally prefer when the show’s drama focuses more on grounded human problems than fanciful issues specific to the witch world, and this whole bad item business seems as fancifully arbitrary as they come. But I highly doubt Doremi could have given up its moral ambitions partway through its first season and still be considered such a classic, so I’m less worried and more intrigued as to how these new elements will interact with the existing formula. And either way, Pop is still a magical girl, so I don’t really get any more narrative requests for at least another season. Let’s dive right in to one more episode of Ojamajo Doremi!