My most-anticipated show of the season. Blood Blockade Battlefront (Japanese: Kekkai Sensen). It didn’t let me down, bringing great direction, true style, and surprisingly substantial characters to the screen for a first episode that was easily my favorite premiere. Thus far, Rie Matsumoto’s sophomore effort as a full series director has been an incredible effort of visual and cinematographic density that has basically become substance all on its own. They say style can sometimes become substance (which isn’t at all to say that BBB doesn’t have substance of the more traditional kind), and that’s certainly what’s happened here.
First Impressions: Spring 2015 Anime (Part 3)
And, somehow, we’ve come to the end of the premieres for the Spring 2015 season! There really haven’t been too many surprises thus far, as nothing I was really looking forward to flopped and only a few shows surprised me. In terms of building a weekly schedule, that’s really something of a boon. In terms of being happy with my schedule, that’s really a boon. So, yeah, let’s finish this up and get into the season for real!
Still to Watch: Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, Ninja Slayer
Ore Monogatari!!, Episode 1
So, in a season of cuteness, more cuteness comes. When it rains, it pours, as they say. Except Ore Monogatari!!) (or My Love Story!! is a different kind of cute from the moe-heavy offerings the Spring 2015 season has already given us. In fact, with our protagonist openly flaunting the typical standards for attractive character designs, Ore Monogatari!! knows it’s a different kind of show. And so, I’m happy to fulfill my promise of episodic reviews for the next 24 weeks of good shoujo anime. Cheers, and I hope you enjoy!
First Impressions: Spring 2015 Anime (Part 2)
Thanks to Funimation holding a bunch of shows (okay, really just BBB and Mikagura) hostage with no release date or time in sight, this post is missing both of those shows, as I’d hoped to include both of them here. Well, oh well. It is what it is, I guess. Anyways, this batch of anime was chock full of deadly cute stuff—ships, ship, more ship, moe, moe, more moe—familiar faces, and a couple of unfortunate duds. The dread of knowing I’m going to have to cut more than I want is already setting in…
Still to Watch: Ore Monogatari!!, Mikagura Gakuen, Pleiades, Punchline, Urawa no Usagi-chan, Ninja Slayer, Kyoukai no Rinne, Yamada-kun, Nisekoi:
First Impressions: Spring 2015 Anime (Part 1)
It’s spring, the season of rebirth and new life and new anime! Due to the whole Easter weekend thing (HAPPY EASTER BY THE WAY!!! AND TO YOU HEATHENS YOU DON’T DO EASTER, I LOVE YOU ANYWAYS :D) this has been kind of a scattershot first impressions—I didn’t go in order and, in places, picked up either the show I was most excited for or the show I thought would fill out the post the best. In any case, I’ve generally been delighted by the season so far, primarily because my chosen shows—Danmachi, Show by Rock!, and Blood Blockade Battlefront—all had great premieres! You won’t find BBB in this post, though, because it is totally episodic post material, so look for that post soon!
Still to Watch: Re-Kan!, Owari no Seraph, Plastic Memories, The Heroic Legend of Arslan, Hello!! Kinmoza, Mikagura Gakuen, Euphonium, Pleiades, Ore Monogatari!!, Punchline, Urawa no Usagi-chan, Ninja Slayer, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Kyoukai no Rinne, Yamada-kun, Nisekoi
The Rose of Versailles: Oscar & the Woman’s Game
If you sit between two worlds, are you really part of either of them? Both will make their claims on you, no matter how you resist. Such is the uncomfortable place Oscar François de Jarjayes finds herself in at the end of episode three of The Rose of Versailles. Despite her desire to remain on the sidelines, watching the tense “duel of the ladies” from a happy neutrality, the news that Lady du Barry has, through the order of the king, acquired Oscar’s mother as her handmaid shocks Oscar and will eventually force her into the realm of female court politics (or so I presume).
But there’s more to it than the implied threat to Oscar’s mother…
Animator Expo Impressions (Part 3)
For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango have 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, 15 of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on the last five of them. Rather than giving them a standard rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.
Previous Posts: Part 1 | Part 2
On these five shorts as a whole: Not quite as strong a group as the last batch. “SEX and VIOLENCE with MACHSPEED” is the only in the group that I’d really consider to be an animation showcase and “Kanón” grew a ton on me after a couple watches, but it’s kind of just a lot a middling stuff with one standout.
Top Winter 2015 Anime: Final Ratings
It was a good season of anime. I realize I’m closing the season on a pretty small selection of shows and that a number of those shows are leftovers from the Fall 2014 season, but even so…this was a good season of anime. I don’t actually know what more to say beyond that. It was good, I really enjoyed it and felt blessed to be watching what I was watching quite a lot, and I’m sad many of these shows are over. And that’s that. Here are the best anime of Winter 2015. Are you ready, Koharu-chan?
[Management: I’ve decided to rename the “Best Animation” category the “Best Visual Aesthetic” category. The idea here is to condense character designs, background art, and general visual appearance into a single category. I’m not really qualified at this point to discuss the actual technical merits of animation, but I can at least tell you what I thought looked good. Additionally, the caption awards have morphed into something a bit different than “the was the best action” show; rather, they’re now more along the lines of “this show had the best romance/action/etc.”]
Snapshot of a Human: Reflections on Death Parade
Could you be an arbiter?
“Where am I? Who am I?”
“You’re an arbiter, made to judge the souls of human beings. The game you will use? One known as life, capable of revealing the greatest darknesses and greatest glories of the human spirit.”
Allow me to suggest that we all possess, in varying degrees, a desire to be an arbiter of the people who surround us. That there is an inhuman, unsympathizing Decim within each of us who seeks to judge—fairly or not—on the basis of our unavoidably limited experiences with other individuals. Yet, fortunately, we all also possess the capacity to emulate Chiyuki and her desire to reach out and understand the humans who are at once laughably simple and impossibly complex.
Winter 2015, Week 11: Highlights of the Week
The week of no bad episodes (almost), with the only stragglers being Rolling Girls, which has really fallen off badly since the Kyoto arc, and Absolute Duo‘s disappointing finale. But that’s a small price to pay for the absurd level of excellence pretty much everything else on the schedule brought out. It was a very good week to be an anime fan.
Mage in a Barrel 