It’s been a year, huh, folks? Trapped inside by a pandemic, tormented by the xenophobia and callousness of our own governments, and hurtling towards a climate change precipice, 2020 has been a year where thriving is utterly out of the question, and just surviving is worthy of applause. In light of the extreme conditions of the world at large, it’s no surprise that anime studios suffered a strain as well, and thus it’s been a relatively light year in anime. But that’s only half the story – personally, this has been a year of change for my relationship with the medium, too.
Tag Archives: Adachi and Shimamura
Adachi and Shimamura – Episode 2
Hello all, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to continue our journey through Adachi and Shimamura, whose first episode demonstrated a nuance of characterization and grace of imagery that seemed to indicate it is Exactly My Sort Of Thing.
On the character front, both Adachi and Shimamura seem like complicated and pleasingly messy people. There’s a frankness to their characterization that gives the show a real sense of impact – Adachi isn’t just a loner, she’s a genuine outcast, while Shimamura isn’t just disaffected, she acts on that dissatisfaction by openly mocking her alleged friends. Their feelings and the contexts of their lives feel petty and human, making it easy to invest in their awkward emerging relationship.
In visual terms, AdaShima combines KyoAni-reminiscent tricks like partial body shots and exaggerated soft focus with an emphasis on visual geometry, making great use of sets like the girls’ ping-pong table to visually illustrate its conflicts and relationships. It’s basically all good stuff so far, and considering the sharp edge the show already possesses, I’m eager to see how messy things get. Let’s check it out!
Fall 2020 – Week 3 in Review
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You’ll be pleased to hear I continued checking out some genuine new anime this week, tackling Adachi and Shimamura, Love Live! Nijigasaki, and whatever else I’ll have managed to sneak in before this article’s post date (editor’s note: it was nothing, he watched nothing else). At the same time, I was happy to chew through some more noteworthy live action films, and once again enjoy that weird sensation of watching something that you know must have been formative for the stuff that was formative for you. Our life experiences and personalities are intrinsically tethered to the media that has spoken to us over the years, so it’s always an odd sensation to meet the aunts and uncles of our childhood idols – but also thrilling, as we begin to understand the long lines of influence stretching across media, drawing us closer to meaningfully contributing to that chain. So yeah, the great astral tether of media inheritance, all today in the Week in Review!
Adachi and Shimamura – Episode 1
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’ll be continuing with my unexpectedly timely episode notes, as we explore the premiere of yet another airing show: Adachi and Shimamura.
At first glance, Adachi and Shimamura looks like precisely my sort of thing: a delicate, intimate character drama, elevated through precise character acting and a keen understanding of conversational nuance. You could with some accuracy call this the “Kyoto Animation Formula,” but KyoAni hardly have a monopoly on productions like this, and from Wandering Son to Bloom Into You to After the Rain to Just Because to Stars Align to… well, as you can see, I’m a fan of the genre.
Beyond its general genre space, Adachi and Shimamura’s key staff also seem reasonable enough. Director Satoshi Kuwabara doesn’t have any big hits to his name, but his history reveals enough storyboarding and art director credits to make it clear he understands the importance of staging and cinematography, rather than being a fully management-side leader. More promisingly, series composer and scriptwriter Keichiro Ochi has precisely the type of experience I’m looking forward: a massive number of scripts contributed to Oregairu, which is one of the best-written shows of the last ten years. Without further ado, let’s explore the first episode of Adachi and Shimamura!