Today on ANN, I reviewed the second season of the always satisfying My Hero Academia! As I often mentioned while the season was actually running, it was a great relief to see My Hero Academia’s sequel pick up the pace of adaptation, and give the original’s arcs precisely the amount of screen time they needed. The adaptation even improved over the original at times, making it an altogether excellent take on a very good manga. BRING ON SEASON THREE!
You can check out my full review over at ANN.
Let’s get back to Simoun! Simoun’s first episode was an astonishingly rich premiere, packed with compelling worldbuilding and intriguing thematic subtext. The twin pillars of the holy land’s strange, martially-focused theocracy and its gender-related cultural assumptions gave me a whole bunch to dig into, and on top of that, the episode was also just fast-paced and beautiful. We were given enough natural hints to draw up an alluring portrait of life in this world without exposition ever overrunning narrative, and I’m already somewhat invested in several of our apparent lead characters. Fantastic premieres are a lot more common than fantastic shows, but a great premiere is certainly a good way to start. Let’s see what episode two brings!
March really knocked it out of the park this week, offering one of the strongest episodes of the show altogether. I don’t know what mystical alchemy conspired at SHAFT that allowed them to pull together so many talented animators to work on such a great storyboard, but the results certainly spoke for themselves. I’ve reached a point of zen where I accept that no basically no show can actually look like this every single week, but goddamn is it spectacular when it happens. Great work, team.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.
Today on Crunchyroll, I dug into how well Juni Taisen has balanced the assumptions of its premise and the general demands of dramatic characterization. The show isn’t wasting time killing off its contenders, but those contenders are being used well – their deaths are all meaningful in their own way, and the fact that I actually felt very sad for Chicken and Boar is a testament to the show’s overall writing. You can check out my full piece over at Crunchyroll!
Character Economy in Juni Taisen (Part One)
Isao Takahata boasts a catalog so laudable that it seems strange to see him as any kind of “unsung” director, but given he spent so much of his career working alongside Hayao Miyazaki, it makes sense that he’d end up coming off as the quiet genius of Studio Ghibli. In contrast with Miyazaki’s universally appealing and often family-friendly films, Takahata directs stranger, more idiosyncratic productions, from the devastating Grave of the Fireflies to the nostalgic Only Yesterday, and even a passion project about a series of rural canals. So it remains with his final film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which was released close enough to Miyazaki’s own The Wind Rises to again be dwarfed in public consciousness. And yet, like so much of his work, Kaguya possesses an incredibly distinct beauty, and in its own way speaks to the rustic, nostalgic sensibilities that seem to unite Takahata and Miyazaki.
Just Because! offered another excellent episode this week, demonstrating the fact that even if it can’t keep up its absurd character acting for an entire season, its observations about adolescence are still piercing enough to carry the day. This episode’s post-date cooldown focus lent itself perfectly to Just Because!’s atypical dramatic priorities, resulting in a wide array of charmingly awkward moments. This show is the good stuff.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.
After episode twenty-one’s continuous suffering, twenty-two opens with a welcome fragment of levity. Having finally received Himari’s scarfs, Double H decide to come visit her, resulting in some solid comedy and a charming scene between them and Ringo. Himari isn’t home, of course, but Ringo is happy to accept their gift. In the midst of Penguindrum’s heaviest material yet, it’s nice to be reminded that some people in this world can be happy, and that people can still care about each other.
The anime is just gonna keep being good, I guess! Fall 2017 continues to be one hell of a season, offering a wide variety of strong shows that so far haven’t really faltered at all. If anything, the fact that this season, and particularly its surprise hits, have been so consistently strong is prompting me to be a little harsher to shows I’d otherwise be happily accommodating. In this case, it means that I’m probably parting ways with The Ancient Magus’ Bride. The manga’s adaptation is perfectly “okay,” but “okay” is just not enough this season – I’m not getting anything out of the anime that I didn’t get out of the more tightly composed manga, and meanwhile, we’ve got stuff like MMO Junkie and Juni Taisen totally blowing me away every single week. I’m sorry Chise, but your adventures turned out to be late by exactly one season. Let’s set that sad parting aside and run the rest of this week down!
After three straight episodes of wild adventures in Pure Illusion, Flip Flappers’ fourth episode sticks entirely to the real world. As our mad scientist friend details in the first scene, Cocona and Papika’s “impedance is all over the place.” Without a clear emotional bond and mutual understanding, it’s impossible to control their own journeys into Flip Flappers – to be in control in these emotional landscapes, you must first understand and synchronize your own feelings. And so the two of them are tasked with living together for a few days, in hopes of “understanding and accepting one another.” It’s essentially the Evangelion DDR episode, a chance for our two leads to actually bond.
March finally pulled itself together this week, offering an episode that was strong in both comedy (!!!) and drama. The difficult path up out of depression was nicely illustrated through the contrasting halves of this episode, where Rei’s lighthearted shenanigans with the other shogi club members were brought to a shuddering halt by his memories of childhood bullying. Between that and seeing the sisters again, this episode seemed determined to remind me of all the things this show is actually good at. It was a very welcome reminder!
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below.