The Summer 2016 season of anime is long over, but I’m still thinking about some of the shows I watched back then—and that’s a good sign. On the whole, I felt it was a pretty okay season, with a more balanced spread of truly great shows and shows that were just fun to watch than we’ve had during the rest of the year.
It’s been quite a while since I first wrote about the orange manga about two-thirds of the way through its publication run on Crunchyroll. Now, an improbable anime adaptation has aired and I am compelled to, at last, put words to the feelings I have about the show. While I probably will continue to regard the manga as the superior version of the story, the merits of the anime adaptation are substantial—and, as you’ll read, ultimately none of that matters when it comes to orange anyways.
We’re back at it again with Mob Psycho 100, a show I never really thought I was going to get a chance to talk about on a theme level because it was just so disjointed. But here we are, as it turns out, “Be kind,” is a rightfully powerful unifying force. It’s pretty neat to see how such a simply idea can bring together so many scattered thoughts and make sense of them. And for it to be one as important as kindness is pretty cool, too.
There’s gold to be found in the heart, and treasure to be found in the working of it.
Hello, hello! Let’s talk about murder! Or, more specifically, how murder looks (in 91 Days). I’ve been wanting to write something about 91 Days‘ visuals for a while now, but despite some attempts at cinematographic motifs, the show never quite gave me a concrete visual paradigm to explore. But, somehow, I came up with this kind of topical approach, and while I think it could use some refining in the future, I also think it’s pretty good!
New Game! has kind of sneakily become one of my favorite shows of the Summer 2016 season, but it’s not just because of the great character designs or the pretty colors. Instead, I think there are some elements to the show that really ground it in a semi-reality and make it feel much more substantial (even if it’s only softly so) than your normal cute girls doing cute things anime.
Shows like Absolute Duo have shown I’m weak to anime where the central relationship is solid, and Konobi falls into that category. And so I wrote about what makes Usami’s crush on Uchimaki better than your average anime blushing.
Tongue-in-cheek title aside (I seem to wind up with a lot of those for these columns, not sure why), this probably ranks up there with the more ambitious posts in terms of attempted idea communication that I’ve done for Crunchyroll. It’s also potentially one of the most flawed (depending on what you think of some of the underlying assumptions I made in writing it), but haven’t I always said that flawed anime can be interesting? I hope this post is, as well.
The way this blog has been lately, you’d almost think I wasn’t even watching any anime this season (that would be false).
I was reflecting on my drive home about anime that have made me legitimately angry. I think I cut out of Re:ZERO before I got to that point.
Mage in a Barrel 