Rei had his long-awaited first match with Meijin Souya this week, which turned out to be a bit of a pleasant anticlimax. This episode certainly followed through on Souya’s generally mythic presence, but the actual match was nearly over before it began. Still, both that match and the later material between Rei and Souya were entertaining in their own way, so I can’t really complain.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.
It’s time to embark on a new project! Scorching Ping Pong Girls is a recent enough production that I actually watched its first episode for the preview guide way back when it aired, and while I remember finding that enjoyable enough, I didn’t end up sticking with the show. The biggest takeaway I still remember is that it had an unusually sharp sense of emotional interiority for its slice of life/comedy/sports drama space, and also I think the match scenes were handled pretty well? Anyway. It’s maintained a humble but largely positive reputation since then, and seems to still be remembered pretty fondly within my own incredibly specific subsphere of anime fandom. All the various excerpts I’ve seen seem to imply this is a charming and surprisingly robust production, so I’m very on board to get started. Let’s start off with the first episode of Scorching Ping Pong Girls!
Let’s return to ef – A Tale of Memories! The show’s run through a battery of dramatic twists over the past couple episodes, as Kei has fought to keep Hiro away from Miyako and the Renji/Chihiro relationship has run up against the limitations of Chihiro’s disability. Miyako has revealed herself to be the deeply scarred child of a broken home, while Renji has finally witnessed Chihiro at her most vulnerable. Considering the ways Kei has worked to keep Miyako out of Hiro’s life, I’m not sure it sounds terribly healthy for him to end up with either of these girls, but I’m certainly still invested in their drama. And the Renji-Chihiro story has risen from seemingly contrived origins to stand as a smartly articulated and very compelling romance. I’d frankly be happy if this episode focused entirely on the two of them establishing a relationship beyond the constraints of Chihiro’s diary, but I’ve got a feeling Miyako will be taking center stage this time. And hey, I guess Kyosuke still also exists? Either way, I’m excited to get started on one more episode!
It’s time for Flip Flappers! Let’s explore… what is unfortunately, undoubtedly the worst episode of the series. Sorry to be a bummer, but episode eight just does not match the standard set by the rest of this altogether wonderful show. But exploring how things go wrong can be just as illuminating as exploring what they get right, and it’s not like this is a bad episode by general anime standards, anyway. So let’s get started on Flip Flappers’ biggest flop, and see what we can glean from its mistakes.
Today I’ve got a full review of ReLIFE, a neat little character drama that kind of died in fan consciousness due to its all-at-once release schedule. The show is messy and looks like crap, but it’s got a unique pitch that leads to some uniquely compelling thoughts on growing up, as well as a generally good ear for character. It doesn’t really balance out to a good show, but I still enjoyed the ride!
You can check out my full review over at ANN.
What the heck, where did this season come from. I still feel I had pretty much every reason to expect this to be a mediocre season, but the straight-out outrageous quality of shows like A Place Further Than the Universe and After the Rain have kept my schedule totally packed. There are enough good shows that I wasn’t even able to watch them all this week – I still need to catch up on Mitsuboshi Colors, and only just now rushed through the latest Universe. On the whole, it appears this season’s relative wildcards are carrying the day, while the more sure things like Evergarden and Franxx are turning out to be a great deal more suspect. But either way, this season is full of absolutely beautiful shows, and some of them are even good in other ways. Let’s run this week down!
We were stuck in transition mode for this week’s March, as we segued out of Hina’s story and into Rei’s match with Meijin Souya. That meant this episode didn’t really have much of a chance of being a highlight, but it was still entertaining on the whole, and actually one of the funnier episodes in recent memory. So-so March is still a very fine show.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.
Alright, let’s get right back to Chihayafuru! Chihaya suffered a pretty crushing defeat last week, finding herself beaten by the eternal Rules Lawyer Queen and prior Actual Queen. Chihaya has begun to internalize processes of reading her opponent, and
moving beyond her wholly speed-based play, but this battle demonstrated that she’s still not mentally strong enough to avoid being easily rattled. Our heroine’s natural focus has thus become its own kind of liability – Chihaya is generally so competitive that
she doesn’t really need to work on settling her nerves, but when her confidence is actually shaken, that means she’s also not really equipped to handle it. We may spend some time attempting to overcome that hurdle now, or we may jump over to Arata’s own struggles. Either way, we’ve only got a few episodes left in Chihayafuru’s first season, so we’re hopefully building up to something. Let’s see what episode twenty-three brings!
Let’s continue our journey through Simoun! Episode six was one of the most important episodes so far in a viewer-investment sense, as it gave us some desperately needed insight into the feelings of Para, Kaimu, and even Neviril. After several episodes of feeling stranded in something close to a dramatic stasis, we now have an emotional understanding of not just those three, but also Limone and Aaeru, meaning we can meaningfully perceive the dramatic push and pull of their various desires. On top of that, Para is actually working on the same side as Aaeru now, and has given Neviril her blessing to find a different pair. Simoun has been a slow burner ever since its dramatic first episode, but it feels like things are finally coming together now, and Neviril may actually come out of her shell. Almost all of these characters bear some kind of trauma that inhibits their freedom, but now that we actually understand their feelings and goals, it’ll be much easier to sympathize with their struggles. Let’s get right to it!
Belladonna of Sadness is a film that would not be made today.
Partly this is due to its unique artistic genesis. Though Osamu Tezuka certainly wasn’t the first to create anime, it was his low-image-count innovations and ridiculously cutthroat episodic pricing that allowed it to become a commercial TV medium. You can thus almost blame Tezuka for some of the massive limitations the medium still suffers under, from its criminally depressed animator wages to its emphasis on cost-cutting at the expense of the final product. Tezuka’s innovations were often mercenary ones: “how few frames will it require for this to present the illusion of movement? How much of this episode’s animation can be stored in the bank for later episodes?” Much of what would become anime’s recognized “visual vocabulary” was built out of necessity, choices made to mitigate the artistic limitations of these harsh restrictions.