This week in anime was really good! Super good, in fact! It wasn’t just held up by one or two shows – almost every show I’m watching (aside from Beautiful Bones, but that doesn’t really count) either held strong or pulled off one of its best episodes, and a bunch of these episodes even demonstrated strengths their shows hadn’t previously exhibited. The Perfect Insider was full of strong character moments, Owarimonogatari returned to the beautiful art designs of arcs long past, and One Punch Man succeeded not just as an animation showcase, but as an emotional drama. I’ve got all sorts of good things to say about these episodes, so let’s get right to it and RUN ‘EM DOWN!
Casshern Sins – Episode 3
The third Casshern Sins contained a slower, smaller story than the second, more reminiscent of the first episode’s long walk on the beach. Though it wasn’t as rich in character or narrative, it did fill in gaps in the story so far; Casshern met his first human, and that experience lent a necessary warmth to counterbalance the show’s usual solemnity. We’re still wandering through archetypal vignettes in a desolate wasteland, but Casshern’s cumulative experiences are slowly building him into a person worth following on this journey.
Winter 2016 Season Preview
We’re approaching the last act of the fall season, which means it’s time once again to shift an eye towards winter and see what the future might bring. This winter season is not looking good, frankly – there are basically no shows I have strong confidence in, and even the potential hits are pretty sparse. But every season has its surprises, and it’d be hard for a season to be as barren as this past summer anyway, so I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end. Winter seasons are historically pretty lousy, anyway; last winter was a fantastic outlier, but with nothing like Shirobako carrying over and nothing as promising as Death Parade or Yurikuma awaiting us, we’re going to have to forage our way through the lean months. Check out your backlog, finish shows you fell behind on, and maybe spare a minute or two to check in on a few of these potential titles
As usual, I won’t be running down every upcoming title here – you can read synopses as well as I can, and there’s only so much I can say about Crappy Light Novel Adaptation #375. You can check out the full list over at anichart, but I’m just going to be hitting the stuff that actually looks interesting to me, and explaining why. Let’s get right to it!
Casshern Sins – Episode 2
In my first writeup on Casshern Sins, I worried that the show’s distant and deliberately mythic tone might prevent it from succeeding on a personal, emotional level. That issue remains a possibility, but this episode certainly didn’t reflect it; it was sad and intimate and remarkably successful, maintaining the sense of inevitability the show consistently demonstrates while offering up enough personal moments to make the Ruin succeed as small-scale tragedy. Things are still progressing as an intentionally archetypal epic story, but intimacy of telling and strong execution could make that work as well here as it does in something like Madoka Magica.
Owarimonogatari – Episode 9
Monogatari returned to top-tier form this week, with an episode whose visual theatrics were somewhat reminiscent of Shinobu Time’s gorgeous full-episode tapestry. And in fact, the visual tricks here were even more diverse than that, with shots mirroring that tapestry sharing space with some cut-paper images, creepy black and white interpretive shots, and great visual compositions done in Monogatari’s house style. Plus this episode featured a mix of Araragi and Shinobu bantering and Gaen just totally dominating everybody, so the narrative end was solid too. We’re not really in anything approaching the emotional turmoil of Sodachi’s material, but this was a fantastic episode on the visual end, and that’s more than enough to satisfy me for now. It even ended with a genuinely thrilling cliffhanger, implying a number of eerie possibilities regarding the nature of Shinobu’s old friend. We’ll have to see where it goes from here.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
The Perfect Insider – Episode 8
The Perfect Insider pulled out another great episode this week, cementing the rally it began in last week’s episode. Instead of working to push the overt narrative forward or give us lots of new information, this one instead honed in on the relationship between Moe and Souhei, offering up some of their most compelling exchanges since the very first episode. Between last week’s reveals and this week’s behavior, Souhei is actually somehow coming into his own as a character, coming across as pretentious for sure, but also legitimately dedicated to Moe in a familial way. Now that it seems clear there’s never going to be any romance there, and for a very good and understandable reason, their relationship is much more engaging. I hope the show can keep this up through the ending.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
K-On! The Movie – Review
And to the surprise of no-one, my return visit to K-On! ends with the girls’ trip to London. This film wasn’t as strong as the show’s second season, but it was still relatively enjoyable; there was some retreading of material and some kinda awkwardly stretched-out sequences, but also a bunch of great jokes and some legitimately moving moments as well. Some of the London gags were great, like the very silly room-switch joke with Azusa and Yui. And the last two performances, along with the girls’ run across their school’s rooftop in between them, were extremely strong. I particularly liked Yui leaping off the stage into her classmates and then turning to play right back to the band – that reprise of the first season finale felt like a pretty beautiful capstone to their journey. K-On! is good, and this movie was pretty good too.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my movie notes below!
Beautiful Bones – Episode 8
I am incapable of expending any more energy writing about this incredibly, tediously mediocre show. Instead here is a gif of Mugi, who is much better than this boring anime.
Much better. If you’re still interested in Beautiful Bones for some reason, you can check out my writeup over on ANN or my notes below.
Symphogear GX – Review
And we’re back! After a brief detour to watch every friggin’ episode of K-On!, I’ve returned to finally catch up on the summer’s most symphogear of attractions. I had fun with this one, but honestly didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the last two, and for pretty predictable reasons. The most structurally understandable reason is that this season went for something Symphogear has historically not been terribly good at – more investment in its actual narrative and character journeys. But even that would have worked well enough if the show had stuck the landing, and personally I felt the last few episodes of this season were some of the weakest of the show so far. It particularly hurt that the show knocked off all the Autoscorers before the finale – they were always more fun to battle with than Carol herself, who basically just battled with DBZ beams. But still, Symphogear is Symphogear. I enjoyed this season well enough, and I’ll probably enjoy the next one too.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
Casshern Sins – Episode 1
Casshern Sins is a weird one. Coming out in 2008, it got in at the front end of our recent “heavier reinterpretation of classic cartoon” trend, which has more recently given us Gatchaman Crowds and Yatterman Night. Casshern Sins takes off a ‘70s anime about the android Casshern, who fights evil robots; this new version seems more focused on ambiguity and melancholy than justice. The writer, Yasuko Kobayashi, has a resume that mixes a bunch of tokusatsu shows and recent hits like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Attack on Titan (as well as 2014’s Garo, which splits the difference). The director Shigeyasu Yamauchi’s credits are more scattered – he’s handled a number of DBZ and Saint Seiya movies, but beyond that it’s mostly episodic directorial work, including the, er, Ami/Mami Detectives episode of Idolmaster. Perhaps his most notable credits I’m familiar with are two of the most visually compelling episodes of Shinsekai Yori – the controversial fifth episode, where people originally complained about the divergent visual style, and the transcendent tenth, where his evocative interpretation of Saki and Shun’s conversation represented one of the clear highlights of the series overall.