Tag Archives: Love Live!

Love Live! Sunshine!! – Review

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Today on ANN I reviewed the first season of Love Live! Sunshine!!, an altogether compelling followup to the first Love Live that possesses an interesting mix of effectively purposeful and exhaustingly slobbering reverence for its predecessor. It was fun to return to Sunshine and fun to discuss its mix of strengths and weaknesses – shows like Love Live, where their greatest strengths are based in their most practical craft fundamentals, are some of the most rewarding to formally review. I hope you enjoy the piece!

Love Live! Sunshine!!

The Secret of Love Live’s Success

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Time for a new ANN editorial! I’m diving into Love Live this time, talking about the specific and very noteworthy strengths that make this show so compelling. Love Live embodies a fair number of the qualities that make anime appealing as a medium in general, so I was happy to have a chance to discuss some of its major accomplishments. I could easily talk about camp or communal engagement for far longer than one editorial (and I have before), but for now, I’m happy to have a semi-reasonable excuse to write the phrase “Nico and Maki’s potato marriage” in a critical context. ANYWAY!

The Secret of Love Live’s Success

Love Live Sunshine

Summer 2016 – Week 3 in Review

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Dear lord, one week after the retrospective and we’re already a quarter through the season. This season ended up offering a stronger collection of shows than I was initially expecting, meaning I get to be fairly discerning in choosing what I actually keep up with. At this point, I’m legitimately excited about everything I’m watching – we’ve got a great mix of pure fun (Love Live, Thunderbolt Fantasy) and engaging drama (Orange, Planetarian), with Mob Psycho offering a dash of action and visual creativity. Let’s start with those new Love Lives and run this week down!

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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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The Intoxicating Lure of Idol Anime

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No escaping it now, apparently. I’m stuck in idol hell, so I might as well document the whole process, to save future generations from this dire fate. This is a sprawling article, one that covers my experience at the Love Live! movie, my time spent with four separate idol anime, some thoughts on that whole Database, Database thing, and more besides. It’s a bit more of a personal reflection than the stuff I normally do, but I hope you enjoy it. This past year has definitely been quite a ride.

The Intoxicating Lure of Idol Anime

The Idolmaster

Summer 2015 – Week 11 in Review

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Wednesday has come again! Once again, I devoured an absurd bounty of anime this week, all concentrated into one friggin’ show. It turns out when I don’t have a day job, I can really crank through those reviews. Who would have guessed! I’ll probably spend next week working more on site interface stuff and freelance work, working towards establishing ways to make funding specific writeups more accessible, but for now, all I can do is marvel at the fact that I’ve probably watched around seventy episodes worth of anime in the last two weeks.

Fortunately, this week was all upside – not only did I watch the second half of a good show, even the weekly stuff put out some stellar episodes. So let’s start right there, appropriately beginning for the very first time over in this season’s reliable Trash Alley.

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Love Live! Movie – Review

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LOVE LIVES IN THEATERS. LOVE LIVES ON THE SCREEN. The Love Lives just cannot be contained, and this weekend I finally got to see those Love Lives large and in charge at my local theater. The movie was very much a fanservice-filled victory lap, but I still had a fun time with it – it’s nice to see these characters again, nice to see some new performances, and holy crap was the crowd into it. Pretty much every time I see an anime in theaters, the crowd hangs on every word, but this was something else. Every joke got a full house of laughter, every sad moment a chorus of “awww”, and every performance a rousing round of applause. Seeing something like Love Live in a theater really brings home the communal nature of a show like this – it’s about characters you’ve all invested in together, and that communal investment is paid back in what you get out of the series. Fans in full costume desperately trading a Rin card for a Maki one is as much “what Love Live is” as any of the actual anime.

Anyway, you can check out my full review over at ANN!

Love Live!

Summer 2015 – Week 5 in Review

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Nearing the halfway point again! And once again, I’m gonna keep things loose and flowing here for the week in review. When I’ve only got a couple episodes worth actually talking about, and I’m already covering one of them in great essay-sized blocks for ANN, I gotta do what I can to fill your Wednesdays with criticism and joy. So let’s run down all the random crap I’ve been watching, starting at the top with G-G-GATCHAMANNNN.

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Summer 2015 – Week 4 in Review

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Wednesday has come again! And I’m at a bit of a loss. As I’ve mentioned before, the fact that I’m watching so little this season means these week in review posts feel a little barren to me. So I’m gonna take that situation as a chance to experiment a bit – get a little looser and more conversational with the style, and actually cover how my “week in anime” really was, and not just blurbs about the specific airing shows.

So how was this week in anime?

It was extremely damn good, actually. Because I’m not being overwhelmed with airing shows and am somewhat ahead on my ANN work, I was able to get to a bunch of backlog stuff. I’ve got a pretty diverse mix of shows I’m watching now, but I guess we can start with the stuff that actually was airing. Let’s run it down!

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Love Live! – Review

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YOU CAN’T STOP THESE IDOLS. Yep, I reviewed Love Live! for ANN, and it turns out Love Live! is totally great. I’d watched this series back over the spring/summer as well, but I actually enjoyed it even more watching it this second time. I think even just that recently, I was kind of holding stuff that didn’t fall within my usual genre wheelhouse at arm’s length – “yeah, it’s pretty good, but it’s still a silly idol show.” Nah, that’s dumb. Love Live! has really sharp storytelling and production, and is just a relentlessly enjoyable show in general. It’s funny and endearing and crazy polished, and I’m looking forward to hopefully reviewing the second season too.

My full review is available over at ANN. My clearly indispensable episodic notes are all below!

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