Tag Archives: Anime

Love Live! S2 – Review

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Yep, I finally got around to reviewing Love Live S2’s physical release. The show pretty much stuck to its same strengths and weaknesses in the second season, leaning even more heavily into its strong dorky comedy early on, falling once more into unearned and overplayed drama in the last act. It’s not a truly great show, but it’s an extremely enjoyable one, and that’s a fine thing to be. Love Live is basically the default idol show – fun and polished, perhaps just a bit impersonal, but still a very endearing time overall. I hope Sunshine can live up to the original’s legacy.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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Spring 2016 – Week 4 in Review

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God damn is this ever a season of anime. I keep trying to drop shows, but they all keep being too entertaining. And now I check out Macross Delta and find out that’s a lot of fun, too? I really wouldn’t have minded one or two of these shows back a season ago, but it’s also great to log on twitter and see people enjoying such a wide variety of new anime. Even this season’s ambiguous productions are generally coming up solid – Kiznaiver had its strongest episode yet this week, and other borderline stuff like Haifuri is executing well, even if it’s not exactly my thing. It’s a fine time for watching too goddamn many cartoons, so let’s start at the top and RUN ‘EM DOWN!

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Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Episode 9

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Madoka Magica’s ninth episode opens with a terrible transformation, as the witch that was Sayaka Miki takes form. Not yet aware of the true nature of witches, Kyouko fights back against this new creature, asking what it did with her friend. But even if the audience hadn’t figured out the truth by now, Kyubey has finally spilled the beans.

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Flying Witch – Episode 3

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Flying Witch had another fine episode this week, one that set up a nicely specific contrast between the beauty of rural life and the wonder of Makoto’s magic. The show is achieving a good balance so far, where the magic is understated enough to not dominate the production, and the farming and cooking and whatnot are all compelling enough to keep things moving as well. The cast has a great chemistry, the tone is consistently on point, and the humor isn’t always consistent, but still keeps things charming throughout. I would happily watch a slice of life this good every single season.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Kiznaiver – Episode 3

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Kiznaiver went a long ways towards alleviating my main concerns in its third episode. The important thing here was that in contrast to the first two episodes’ big, bold declarations of feelings, this one had some legitimately sharp incidental character writing. Obviously Mari Okada is perfectly capable of sculpting fully realized characters, but the first two episodes made me worried this whole show was going to exist at a ridiculously heightened emotional revelation tenor, and this episode avoided that entirely. I’m happy to see this sensitivity and restraint, and I hope it keeps up until the show decides to punch us in the face with emotions again.

You can check out my full writeup over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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The Lost Village – Episode 4

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This week’s Lost Village initiated what I hope will be a consistent trend, where the more the show leans into its actual horror plot, the less it feels like a show that shouldn’t possibly exist. The Lost Village has an absolutely ridiculous cast and ludicrous dialogue, but when those characters are being forced to react to monsters and killers appearing in cracks of thunder and stuff like that, they react pretty much the same way anyone else would. So I guess as long as this cast keeps being continuously attacked and terrified, The Lost Village will continue to be able to pretend it is actually a real show.

You can check out my full writeup over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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Planetes – Episode 1

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Oh man, what a premise. So, in an age of bountiful space travel, humanity has discovered a new threat lurking in the atmosphere – its own accumulated garbage, courtesy of many decades of letting dead satellites and junked ships and various other machine parts all just kinda float there. So in order to avoid having more and more ships and satellites get damaged by ultra-fast flying garbage, companies begin to create debris gathering departments, the most high-altitude janitors in the business.

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Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Episode 8

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“Like a spent gladiator / crawling in the colosseum ducts / he can count on his remaining limbs / all the people he can trust.”
– The Mountain Goats

Sayaka Miki is falling apart. As she strikes again and again down on the fallen witch, we see a girl who’s completely given in to her anger, because she has nothing else to guide her. In the wake of her fight, she doesn’t even use this chance to protect herself – she tosses the Grief Seed to Kyouko, saying she doesn’t want to “owe” Kyouko anything. Sayaka’s need to be a hero has isolated her entirely now, and Kyouko revealing that they have much in common has actually made things worse for her. Sayaka doesn’t want to believe Kyouko is an older, wiser version of herself – she wants to believe she’s an enemy of justice, and thus foists that identity on her. What Sayaka wanted has spiraled beyond her reach, and with the situation no longer in her control, she reverts to her simplistic “I just have to be stronger to make this work.” But none of these characters are strong enough to make it alone.

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C³ – Review

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You know, I had a pretty fine time with C³. This may at least in part come down to the fact that I watched it directly after Psycho-Pass 2, which was a legitimately repellent experience. In comparison to that, C³ was a breath of fresh air – sure, the writing might have been crap and the fanservice gags tired as hell, but this show actually liked its characters, and was able to have fun sometimes. C³ adolescent grimdark nonsense was limited to stuff like Fear’s ridiculous set of torture-themed attacks, instead of, you know, stabbing puppies to death and exploding people for no reason. Also, Shin Oonuma kinda rolled his weird-ass visual brand all over this one, which at least gave me plenty of neat stuff to look at. As far as bad shows go, C³ is a perfectly harmless one.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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Spring 2016 – Week 3 in Review

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With this season’s extended preview week finally over, I found myself left with way too many fine shows to watch. Thus, this week was one more return to The Culling, that fun time of year when shows that would be reasonable watches in weaker seasons all get the axe purely for pragmatic reasons. Between full show reviews, Current Projects work, and other various media, I can only really spare the time for a bit more than half a dozen airing shows, and so anything that isn’t truly noteworthy had to be cut. That still didn’t make this easy, of course – this season is good, I want to watch everything I can. But I was able to trim some hedges here and there.

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