Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve got plenty more thoughts on a variety of movies for you all today, opening with even more exploration of Hayao Miyazaki’s early films. I also continued to deeply wound myself through repeated exposure to the filmography of Hirokazu Kore-eda, and even watched through Greg Daniels’ much-maligned new Netflix production. There’s a lot of media to cover and I’m sure you all have busy Wednesdays to get back to, so let’s not waste any more time, as we run down more of film and television’s bounteous treasures in another Week in Review!
Tag Archives: Anime
Why It Works: Here’s Why You Absolutely Need to Catch Up on My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU!
With the summer season nearly upon us, this week’s Why It Works ended up being unsurprisingly dedicated to singing the praises of Oregairu, one of my very favorite anime, and one of the first shows I fell in love with as someone actively writing about anime. Oregairu’s first season was excellent and second season phenomenal, and if you haven’t actually seen it, you’ve still got a few weeks left before its finale season begins. GET TO IT!
Why You Absolutely Need to Catch Up on My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! – Episode 11
Hello everyone, and welcome back once more to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll at last be continuing our journey through Masaaki Yuasa’s joyous and beautiful Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, as our crew struggle to complete an alien invasion anime celebrating their unique hometown. Though they’ve endured persistent interference courtesy of their school administration and meddling parents, Kanamori has held this team together, the siren allure of capitalizing on her friends’ talents keeping her dedicated even as the whole world conspires against them.
Meanwhile, her friends aren’t really making things easier for her. Last episode saw them joining Doumeki on a sound-gathering expedition largely because it sounded fun, and Asakusa still doesn’t have a clear overall storyboard, and still hasn’t clarified the designs of the townsfolk’s defenses relative to the alien attackers. I don’t expect this episode to be twenty straight minutes of Kanamori shaking her by the shoulders until a plan falls out, but we’re getting pretty close to that point. With panicked brainstorming and major crunch time on the horizon, let’s get back to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
Symphogear AXZ – Episode 3
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re returning to Symphogear AXZ, as our team stands on the brink of battle with the nefarious Bavarian Illuminati. Granted, that’s not really saying anything, considering our team has either been on the brink of or fully engaged in battle for basically every single moment of this season so far. AXZ’s first two episodes have been one continuous, ever-escalating action sequence, as the show seemingly attempts to construct an entire season with the no-brakes pacing and rolling action setpieces of your average Symphogear premiere. The show will undoubtedly have to catch its breath eventually, but right now it is soaring like a majestic eagle, scattering narrative tidbits like “the illuminati want to control history” or “Chris’ childhood trauma still haunts her” in the margins between its true passion: illustrating Symphogear users and alchemists beating the ever-loving crap out of each other. I salute Symphogear in its noble mission, and support its efforts to make a season-length run-on sentence out of one continuous action scene. LET’S GET TO THE FIGHT!
Pokemon Sun and Moon – Episode 11
Folks, I am watching more Pokemon and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop me. While I did indeed only recently watch Sun and Moon’s previous episode, that episode turned out to be entirely taken up by Ash’s first Grand Island Trial. And while I certainly enjoyed watching Ash compete in his first major battle of the series, twenty minutes of straight action meant I’m still feeling criminally deficient in the style of slice of life, vacation-centric shenanigans that I actually love most about this show. Sun and Moon has an incredibly charming core cast, a beautiful aesthetic, and a fundamental understanding that Alola itself can serve as an inherent dramatic reward, whether we’re exploring its towns, beaches, or mysterious jungles. Wherever this episode takes us, I’m hoping the show finds some new ways to celebrate its inviting setting and terrific ensemble cast as we return to Sun and Moon!
Summer 2020 Season Preview
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This is usually the point in this article where I say I can’t believe how quickly the time has passed, but let’s be real here: we’re all stuck inside, time has no meaning, and individual days are beginning to meld into one endless, featureless procession of the eternal Now. I hope you’re all doing your best to cope with quarantine in your own ways, but either way, time has been accelerating all throughout the spring, and at this point it feels like no surprise to already have reached the summer preview.
COVID’s global presence also means that the summer anime season has been dramatically diminished, with a great number of shows either pushed back or cancelled entirely. Fortunately, the surviving properties contain a few shows I’m genuinely hyped for, and frankly, I wouldn’t want all these already-overworked animators putting themselves in any danger, anyway. Without further ado, let’s run down the most intriguing prospects of the summer season!
The Girl in Twilight – Episode 3
Hello all, and welcome back to Why It Works! Today we’re exploring more of The Girl in Twilight, a show whose first episode intrigued me and second episode impressed me, which makes me eager to see how it expands from here. Using the handy motif of shifting between radio frequencies, Twilight has established a world where disruptive choices create branching parallel worlds, with each potential choice forming its own ongoing reality. But rather than get swamped in the nitty-gritty of scifi minutiae, Twilight has immediately directed its conceit towards questions of identity and society, through first shifting our heroes to a world where all women are assigned a marriage partner at the end of high school.
I was excited to see Twilight using its fantastical elements to immediately explore such a charged and identity-shaping concept. The greatest strength of Twilight’s first episode was how quickly and convincingly it established the dynamic personalities of its main characters, as well as the distinctive relationships they share. With that bedrock already set, the show is now able to explore how culture actually shapes identity – how it conditions us to see certain concepts as laudable or alien, and in this particular world’s case, how oppressive societal mandates can essentially grind down our individual personhood.
All this social commentary and reflections on identity are precisely my sort of shit, but we’ve also got a more urgent problem to deal with: Nana, who has indeed been granted her wish of “a universe of hot guys,” and now may not even want to come home. This place is strange, but she is wanted here – in contrast, she already feels like an outsider in her own original home. Let’s see how her friends deal with her current predicament!
Kaiba – Episode 2
Kaiba’s second episode opens on a monologue that serves as both a description of its world, and an articulation of its central question. “Are memories one’s soul, or one’s spirit? This is a world where memories can be turned into data, and stored.” The age-old question of where our fundamental “identity” resides is further complicated by the next line, as the narrator explains that in this world, “bad memories are deleted, while fun memories are downloaded.” If memories can be altered, it seems inappropriate to consider them our “soul” – but if we are nothing but that collection of memories, being altered and bartered and passed from body to body, what other selfhood could we be said to possess?
Why It Works: What Anime Should You Check Out After Avatar: The Last Airbender?
With the spring season largely cancelled by COVID, the anime-adjacent thing I’ve most enjoyed recently has undoubtedly been the utterly fantastic Avatar: The Last Airbender. And fortunately, with Avatar having recently gone up on Netflix, this was also the perfect time to recommend anime mirroring a variety of its many strengths. I kinda regret I didn’t fit in a “fully articulated character arcs” segment, but there’s probably only so many times I can recommend March comes in like a lion and Monogatari before someone starts yelling at me. Mushishi will have to do this time!
What Anime Should You Check Out After Avatar: The Last Airbender?
Symphogear AXZ – Episode 2
You folks ready for some goddamn Symphogear? I know I certainly am! Season four’s first episode didn’t so much conclude as it ran out of frames mid-sentence, with the Main Gears still in the midst of battle with some nefarious alchemists, while the Auxiliary Gears squared off against a giant magical sand worm. The gang hasn’t faced a giant magical sand worm yet, but I suspect they’ll approach it using a tried and true method: singing about their feelings while beating the shit out of it with various weapons, possibly with a transformation sequence or two tossed in there for flavor. Now that we’re all back on the same page, let’s dive right into the continuing adventures of SYYYYMPHOOOOOGEAARRRRRRRRRRR!