Dear lord this show is excruciating. Painful from start to finish, saturated with the lost-chances insecurity of youth, extremely good show would not watch again. It almost feels like a defense mechanism that my reviews are so resolutely focused on craft, and not focused on the experience of watching Naho do everything wrong all the time even though she couldn’t possibly do otherwise. It’s a good hurt. Orange is a good show.
You can check out my full review over at ANN!
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!
Orange has held firm for three great episodes now, though I’m hearing the production is actually going through some behind-the-scenes disasters. Fortunately, Orange already isn’t really a show I watch for the grace of its character animation – the director has always been a bit of a weird fit, but the fundamentals of his idiosyncratic style actually mesh pretty well with Orange’s equally unusual style of dialogue and storytelling. Barring some kind of serious rally from Battery, Orange is the current reigning prestige drama, and it’s bearing that crown with relative grace. I demand a steady diet of at least one of these every single season.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode three notes below.
I think we’re gonna make it through, everybody. I was a little worried for a while there, as the first half of this season’s premieres made it seem like I wouldn’t hit even half a dozen potential shows. But the second half rallied with a few very necessary surprises, and so now I’m at the point where it should take me a good three or four weeks to determine that anime is terrible once again.
The season’s highlights slot into a solid variety of genres, leaving us fans with at least one thing to enjoy regardless of whether we’re fans of drama, slice of life, idols, or Toonami, the four core pillars of anime. Last season’s lack of a strong character-focused show will hopefully be made up for by this season’s Orange and ReLIFE, and it’s great to see that Sunshine actually seems to be improving on the Love Live formula. As usual, I’ll be breaking this season’s premieres down into flawlessly objective tiers for your perusal, and including links to all of my longer reviews over at ANN. We’ve got a whole lot of anime to fight through, so let’s get right to business and RUN THIS SEASON DOWN.
Preview week has begun in earnest, and I am dead. The season actually feels pretty frontloaded this time – Orange and Love Live Sunshine have already both confirmed my hype, and DAYS has shown up as an unexpected new challenger. There’s also the usual scattering of mediocre-to-abysmal shows out there, but hey, every medium is mostly crap. It already seems like this season will have a handful of shows worth keeping up with, and that’s good enough for me!
And so another season slowly marches to its end. Spring 2016 has been a pretty fantastic season, all things considered. Personally, this has has been the best season for a solid year, but even outside of my own genre preferences, this season had pretty much something for everyone. I wasn’t even watching a fair number of this season’s biggest shows, but between Concrete Revolutio, Kiznaiver, JoJo, Flying Witch, The Lost Village, and My Hero Academia, I had plenty to enjoy every week.
But soon, all of that will be coming to an end.