Tag Archives: Anime

Spy x Family – Episode 9

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Hello everyone, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. You folks ready for some Spy x Family? I’ve personally been eager to get back the Forgers’ preposterous family drama, and doubly excited given we’re squaring off with a fresh Studio WIT episode. That’s not to say that Cloverworks’ episodes have been bad in any way, but merely that WIT seem regularly determined to overachieve relative to their assignments, pulling off wildly ambitious feats of staging and anime-original sequences like that castle raid just because they can. Even for a more mundane episode like Anya’s entrance at school, dynamic layouts and choice flourishes of animation have helped to elevate Spy x Family’s already-excellent base material.

As for our narrative trajectory, we finished the last episode on one of the show’s first genuine cliffhangers, with Yuri demanding our newlyweds prove just how in love they are. Loid and Yor’s mutual discomfort with lovey-dovey stuff is more than a little improbable, but as long as it keeps facilitating hilarious moments of mutual awkwardness and strained gestures of affection, I’m happy to accept they possess the romantic chops of a pair of middle schoolers. Without further ado, let’s get back to Spy x Family!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 13

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today seems like a perfect day to fetch the wagon and set a course for Green Gables, checking in on the continuing misadventures of Anne and her unique family. In the wake of last episode’s brooch fiasco, I expect Anne and her adoptive parents to be closer than ever; having been forced to admit her own error, it appears that Marilla has perhaps embraced just a touch of humility, while also recognizing that her initial suspicions about Anne were entirely unfounded. Anne is not, as claimed, the wickedest girl Marilla has ever met – she is honest and kind and irrepressibly imaginative, and though Marilla may not understand that last virtue, she is just maybe beginning to appreciate it.

As for the production team, this episode will be reuniting us with the storyboards of Seiji Okuda, a regular Takahata/Miyazaki collaborator who also contributed a number of boards to Heidi, Sherlock Hound, and Lupin III, with a script by Anne regular Seijiro Koyama. Koyama traded off scripting duties with Takahata for a number of these early episodes, and with such reliable key staff in attendance, I expect this episode to hew closely to Takahata’s overall vision of the show. Let’s see what awaits us in Anne of Green Gables!

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Ganso Tensai Bakabon – Episode 4

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You all doing alright today? I’m personally feeling quite fine, as I’ve got the weekend right in front of me and a fresh episode of Ganso Tensai Bakabon on the plate. Charming in its comedy and absolutely jaw dropping in its art design, Bakabon is one of the strangest artifacts of ‘70s anime I’ve come across, overflowing with a level of main staff talent that basically any anime would kill for.

Thirty-odd episodes plus an opening directing by Osamu Dezaki. Art direction by the incomparable Shichiro Kobayashi. Countless other positions filled by key, lasting associates of Oshii, Dezaki, and Studio Ghibli. The more you dig into the show’s staff listing, the more you come across figures like, say, Kazuo Oga, an art designer who’s contributed background art to basically every Ghibli film. Bakabon’s credentials are preposterously impressive, boasting luminaries who’ve elevated decades of the medium’s best productions, and all of them here dedicated to the rambling adventures of a little goblin man and his accommodating family. It’s basically ‘70s Nichijou, making it almost impossible not to love. Let’s see what our gremlin father gets up to next!

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Star Driver – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am beyond eager to get back to Star Driver, whose narrative is currently being invaded by a rampaging Mizuno. After appearing as a brief figure of mystery two episodes ago, this most recent episode saw Mizuno crushing hard on Takuto, forcefully inserting herself into the drama department, and ultimately revealing her status as one of Southern Cross’ legendary shrine maidens. In a mere twenty minutes, she has charged through as much personal drama and lore shakeups as took the original cast half a dozen episodes, handling it all with a wave and a smile.

As my tone might indicate, I am all for this shakeup, and can’t wait to see what Mizuno does next. In contrast with the relatively passive Wako, Mizuno seems to already be pushing Takuto out of his comfort zone, while simultaneously embodying a challenge to the conservative gender paradigm of the shrine maiden system. Her energy seems like a better match for Takuto’s own personality, and perhaps more than anything, she’s just plain fun to be around. Let’s see how Mizuno continues to resculpt this narrative, as we return to the fascinating Star Driver!

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Spy x Family – Episode 8

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Hello everyone, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to get back to Spy x Family, which most recently offered some clear strides in precisely the direction I was hoping for. My persistent complaint from the start of this production has been a relative lack of Yor interiority or agency, and episode seven provided exactly that, as Yor’s experiences with her brother informed her current advice on Loid’s parenting. Unlike Loid, Yor actually has some personal experience dealing with a young family member, and her words helped Loid realize he’d been treating Anya more as a faulty machine than a living daughter. That in turn led to Loid affirming Yor’s place in the family, as he told her to stop considering herself an outsider relative to him and Anya.

I’m very much hoping Yor follows that advice, and continues to loudly assert her own perspective. But either way, I imagine we’re in for some delightful chaos at Eden Academy, with Damien’s infatuation likely to cause even more problems than his prior anger. Spy x Family is continuing to find seemingly limitless lodes of comedy within its conceptual framework, and I’m eager to see whatever nonsense comes next. Let’s get to it!

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Bodacious Space Pirates – Episode 23

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re steering our ship towards Bodacious Space Pirates, which most recently introduced the threat of genuine pirate hunters to harass our intrepid heroes. This was all quite surprising, considering pirates don’t actually engage in any sort of illegal business; they’re basically a combination of traveling entertainers and high-stakes couriers, with all of their missions approved by a central authority.

As such, it’s hard to say who would have a vendetta against any pirates, much less the concept of modern-day piracy in general. And on top of that, we’ve now got some weirdo warping in while standing on top of his spaceship, in full cross-armed Gunbuster array. Bodacious Space Pirates has generally taken care to partition the tone of its various core elements; the lighthearted high school drama doesn’t undercut the grounded scifi worldbuilding, and vice versa. But a dude standing on top of a ship doing sentai poses feels like a traveler from a more super robot-informed universe, and so I’m eager to see how he slots into our existing configuration. Let’s see how this confrontation plays out in a fresh Bodacious Space Pirates!

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 12

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today it seemed like the right time to check back in on The Demon Girl Next Door, and see how our luckless shadow mistress is faring. Last episode offered an unexpected deluge of backstory revelations, raining bombshell after bombshell on Shamiko’s tiny, horn-laden head. As it turns out, it was actually Momo’s sister who helped save Shamiko from the family curse, during the course of her attempts to protect all of this city’s luckless demons. Unfortunately, whatever threats she faced ultimately ended up sealing away Shamiko’s father, reducing him to an orange box the family uses as a makeshift table.

That’s a lot to take in at once! Frankly, it’s also a lot for us in the audience to take in at once, more than doubling our data points regarding this larger magical/demon girl paradigm. It seems that Momo is far from the first magical girl to doubt her mission; in fact, we appear to be living in an overall era of lost faith, with demon-slaying magical girls now more the exception than the rule. Instead, magical girls seem to have collectively acknowledged the inherent injustice of this whole Calvinist paradigm, and more recently have been working to offer the equivalent of social services and reparations to their arbitrarily condemned counterpoints.

All that serves as a humorous continuation of this show’s general themes, as well as an expression of its overall optimism regarding human nature. Rather than letting themselves be controlled by a process that seeks to dehumanize them, the magical girls of this world essentially unionized and rebelled, realizing they had far more in common with their alleged enemies than their overseers. A solution like this is what I’d expect this show to imagine as its potential endgame, so I’m quite interested to see how the drama develops now that we know a post-demon hunting paradigm has already been established. Let’s get to it!

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Fall 2022 – Week 5 in Review

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Hey folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you equipped with ghouls, goblins, and tales of rapturous fantasy, as is only fitting for this most Halloweeny of weeks. Yes, I know Halloween was on Monday, but that’s still closer to this Week in Review than the previous one, so that’s what I’m conceptually going with here. Regardless, this has been a relatively fruitful week of film screenings, including classics of both horror and romance, as well our continuing adventures through the Naruto film canon. Back on the home front, I’ve also been gearing up for the climax to act one of my house’s D&D campaign, where I’m thinking their last opponent might turn out to be an In The Hills, The Cities-style colossus of melded human flesh. Too much? Maybe too much. Still tinkering with that one, I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let’s break down some films!

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Zoku Owarimonogatari – Episode 6

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Alright Araragi, it’s time to figure this shit out. As I’ve suspected and Hanekawa seemed to confirm, this world we’ve been exploring is less of an alternate reality than an internal one; a product of Araragi’s mind, as he desperately seeks an answer to that fundamental question of “who am I, now that my childhood and pre-scripted path are behind me?” In search of that truth, he has held discussions with disparate versions of many of his companions, but avoided the one person who might truly know him well enough to answer: Oshino Ougi, his own Other Self.

As with all of this world’s Oddities, Ougi has served as a container for all the feelings Araragi refuses to acknowledge, a shadow that is as authentically him as his surface personality. His self-hatred and obsession with his own destruction, his lingering regrets regarding the possibilities of his vampiric nature, even his inability to visualize himself as an authentic and consistent person are all realized through Ougi’s mercurial presence. Araragi has come to accept Ougi’s authenticity as a part of him, but has nonetheless avoided their input in this crucial moment. As Sodachi said, what we see in the mirror is only a partial reproduction – Araragi is incomplete without Ougi, so it’s no wonder he’s only been able to produce incomplete answers. With his two sides united at last, let’s see how this strange mirror tale ends!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 12

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Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I figured we might sneak our way back to Green Gables, and check in on the continuing saga of Marilla’s amethyst brooch. Marilla claims Anne lost it and Anne claims she did not; with two such stubborn characters as these, that’s basically all it takes to erect an insurmountable impasse between them. Truthfully, it seems most likely that Anne forgot to remove the brooch before heading off to the Idlewild, and thus it’s nestled safely somewhere along their woodland passageways. But while this conflict’s resolution will likely be simple enough, the course of its drama is serving as an enlightening referendum regarding Marilla and Anne’s feelings towards each other.

On the production front there is much cause for rejoicing, as this episode features the return of Yoshiyuki Tomino on storyboards, as well as Takahata himself on scripts. Tomino’s storyboards for Anne’s first day at Sunday school greatly elevated one of this show’s first emotional climaxes, offering a mixture of evocative symmetrical layouts and scenes where character blocking skillfully amplified emotional intent. That episode’s final reconciliation between Anne and Marika might be my favorite moment of the show so far, and so I expect great things from his execution of Anne and Marika’s latest dust-up. Let’s see how our friends are faring as we return to Green Gables!

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