First Impressions: Spring 2015 Anime (Part 1)

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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

Show by Rock!

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The Rose of Versailles: Oscar & the Woman’s Game

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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…

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Animator Expo Impressions (Part 3)

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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.

Animator Expo

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Top Winter 2015 Anime: Final Ratings

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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.”]

Your Lie in April

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Snapshot of a Human: Reflections on Death Parade

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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.

Death Parade

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Winter 2015, Week 11: Highlights of the Week

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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.

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 24 [End]

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Well, it wasn’t quite the ending I wanted for Akatsuki no Yona (ignoring the fact that I didn’t want any sort of ending), but it was still a nice comma in the longer sentence of the show, a catching of the breath, if you will, for a second season we tragically may never see. But let’s save the lamentations for later and simply enjoy what we have for now.

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Absolute Duo Review

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Decently executed trashy light novel adaptations is a genre I feel the anime industry has unjustly overlooked. Sure, there’s not much money to be made there if the sales of Absolute Duo [8-Bit, 2015] are to be judged and sure, there doesn’t really seem to be much of an audience or much appreciation for the genre, but someone still needs to give credit where credit is due. And director Atsushi Nakayama (in his first full directorial outing) and series composer Takamitsu Kouno deserve a lot of credit for making Absolute Duo a much better show than it had the right to be. As an almost consistently entertaining production, Absolute Duo gets a 4/10 (Ongoing Rankings).

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Your Lie in April Review

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1+1=2, but you don’t have much of an equation if the plus sign is missing and you certainly can’t get to a sum greater than the two addends that way. So it is with Your Lie in April [A-1 Pictures, 2014-2015], without question the most persistently frustrating, yet fascinating, show I have ever watched. Equally capable of presenting an etheral, emotional episode or an outright maddening one, KimiUso (an abbreviation for the show’s Japanese title, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso) is a show of brilliant gems sadly lacking the links necessary to completely finish the equation. But, in the final review, those jewels are still worth something on their own, even if their settings can’t quite match their brilliance. So, my final verdict for Your Lie in April is a 7/10 (Ongoing Rankings). Your Lie in April Continue reading →

Your Lie in April, Episode 22 [End]

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Well, it’s been one heck of a wild, emotional, sometimes frustrating ride, but we’ve come to the end of Your Lie in April. Somethings have ended, but others stretch out for as long as we remember them. It took this episode a few minutes to get going, but when it kicked into high gear, it really kicked into high gear. As expected, the aesthetics truly took charge in this episode and, even if there was a little more digital work than I would’ve liked, the end results was something pretty special. So, now it’s time for one last look at Your Lie in April.

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