Animator Expo Impressions (Part 4)

August 9, 2015August 9, 2015iblessall 3 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango, has been running a cool little project called Animator Expo (there is an English language version of the site) for a while now. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 26 (I’m behind) of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on numbers 15-20. Rather than giving them a standard numbered rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.

Previous Posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

On these five shorts as a whole: Definitely not my favorite batch of shorts so far, but with one new favorite and a couple of conceptually interesting videos, it’s definitely wasn’t a wasted group (at least for the most part).

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Turn A Gundam – DVD Review (Part 1)

August 7, 2015August 7, 2015iblessall Leave a comment

Yet another physical media review completed—this time, it’s the critical and fandom darling of the Gundam franchise, Turn A Gundam (or ∀ Gundam if you want to stylize it properly). I quite enjoyed it, to be honest! It’s not my first Gundam, technically (if you count Build Fighters), but it is my first of the old-school, classic Gundam offerings. Overall, it’s definitely got a quirky charm to it that kept me interested despite its deficiencies.

Here’s the link to the full review!

Anime Weekly: Summer 2015, Week 5

August 5, 2015August 4, 2015iblessall 20 Comments

It’s week five, and things are just trucking along now. Pretty much all of my shows are away from the potential drop bubble at this point, leaving me with a bunch of stuff I’m really enjoying watching each week. Some shows are getting better by the week, others hitting some rough patches, but overall there’s nary a one among them that I’m not excited to watch each week. And that’s the way a weekly schedule should be.

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Aniwords – Let’s Play an Anime Game!

August 4, 2015August 4, 2015iblessall 8 Comments

After last week’s column on the “trapped in an MMO” genre, I was feeling pretty frisky about genre analysis, so I went back to sweep up the shows people mentioned that I didn’t address. This time, however, I’m playing around with the idea of genre and “gamified world” settings—it gets a bit more theoretical and less pointed than last weeks, but I think the post is more fun because the ideas are more adventurous.

Here’s the link! Continue reading →

Anime Weekly: Summer 2015, Week 4

July 29, 2015July 28, 2015iblessall 24 Comments

This was the week the charms of newness started to wear off for a lot of shows. I always feel like early on in seasons, I’m kind of breezing through shows and liking them just because they’re new, but by the time they’re started to kick into their real stories in the fourth episode (note, the fourth, not the stupid third) is when they start to show their cracks or I start to tire of them. How much those two things are related…I’m not sure and I’m not enthused enough to think it through. Anyways!

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Aniwords – What’s Up with “Trapped in an MMO” Anime?

July 28, 2015July 28, 2015iblessall 11 Comments

As a disclaimer, since all of the commentors on Crunchyroll felt obligated to point this out—yes, I’m fully aware the stuff I’m talking about in this post wasn’t “invented” by anime for this particular genre. Of course, I probably don’t need to tell you guys that. You know me well enough to actually listen to what I’m trying to say. Ah, well, such is the price for writing for an audience on a big site versus on my blog. That’ll teach me to sell out…

Here’s the link! Continue reading →

Ping Pong the Animation – Bluray/DVD Review

July 27, 2015June 3, 2017iblessall 2 Comments

You wish you were as good at ping pong as Ping Pong is at telling a story about people who play ping pong.

Ping Pong Butterfly Joe

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Anime Weekly: Summer 2015, Week 3

July 22, 2015July 23, 2015iblessall 19 Comments

I suppose I should be thinking up something insightful to say at this point, but I’ve really got nothing for you guys in terms of summing up the past week of anime. The season’s off to a good start and I’m enjoying pretty much everything that I’m watching, but as a season I’m not overly impressed or disappointed. Everything just kind of is, and if your kind of anime is airing (like it is for me) it’s a pleasant time to be keeping up with the shows that we’ve got.

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Aniwords – What is Moe and Should You Be Afraid of It?

July 21, 2015iblessall 16 Comments

Hey, guys!

My latest Aniwords column is live on Crunchyroll and it’s a real important one this time.

It’s about moe.

Here’s the link!

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Hysteria!: Existential Panic in the Storytelling of Angel Beats

July 18, 2015July 18, 2015iblessall 13 Comments

If you believe in any sort of afterlife at all, it’s fairly easy to conceptualize our time here on earth as a sort of perpetual adolescence. At all stages of our conscious lives—whether teenage, young adult, middled-aged, or elderly—we’re haunted by the uncertainty of the world around us, riddled with the bullets of life, buffeted by the winds of of our emotions. It is, one might say, tough to be be alive and to make sense of life. And perhaps it’s a bit silly to take a story as patently juvenile as Angel Beats! [P.A. Works, 2010] as a microcosm for the full breadth of human life, but as TK might say, “Get chance and luck!”