Animator Expo Impressions (Part 1)

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 the past couple weeks. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 5 of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on them. Rather than giving them a standard rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.

On Animator Expo as a whole: It’s definitely a cool project—feels a bit like the Anime Mirai project that produced Death Billiards and Little Witch Academia—geared specifically for promoting anime as a medium. I started this post before watching the first five, so at the beginning I was pretty curious about the quality of animation and the quality of content that would come out of the project. As with anime in general, it’s been a mixed bag.

Animator Expo

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Your Lie in April, Episode 9

Well, that was definitely not how I was expecting this to all play out. If I’m being totally honest, I think KimiUso (again, that’s the abbreviation of the Japanese title, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso) overdid it this week in a number of place, but the overall effect was a net positive, if just barely. The thing about going for broke each and every week, regardless of content, is that it means some scenes come off like the show is beating you over the head (sorry for the unfortunate idiom use) rather than just being powerful. There were a lot more of the former this week.

Your Lie in April

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Fall 2014, Week 9: Highlights of the Week

Best week of anime this season? Yup, best week of anime this season. It was the mid-tier shows (YuYuYuGaroArgevollen) that really stepped up this week, while YonaYour Lie in April, and Shirobako continue to be one of the best season top tiers since I’ve started watching simulcasts. And, on top of that, Chaika dove into bombastic crazy weirdness with its second-to-last episode. What more could an anime fan want?

Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

Oh, I know. How about a smokin’ hot Lucifer?

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 9

I am so fortunate to be watching and writing about this show.  It is truly one of the highlights of the season for me at this point: deftly written, funny in its funny moments, and incredibly effective in its serious ones. I was thinking earlier this week that Akatsuki no Yona was probably my pet show for the season, but no. That’s not right. It’s just one of the best shows I’m watching.

Akatsuki no Yona

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Fall 2014, Week 8: Highlights of the Week

Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day, but there will still be a post coming out (bless you, WordPress post scheduling). As for this week, as I look back on it now, it was a pretty darn good one. The strong shows continue to do their thing, but a few of the mid-tier shows really showed up with some quality anime entertainment.

PSA: Akatsuki no Yona might be one of the best written shows of the entire season.

YuYuYu

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 8

Well, that was maybe a little more of Yun’s backstory than we needed—but it did a really fine job of setting up a few more contrasts and bringing back the theism-atheism theme that seems like it’s going to be a fundamental part of the show going forward. And man, Yona‘s just so dang good at working the dualisms that we humans live with every day. God or no God? Selflessness or selfishness?

Akatsuki no Yona

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Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta Review

There are always a few shows each season that, for whatever reason, don’t get licensed for streaming. One of the more egregious omissions in recent memory, at least as far as I’m concerned, is Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta [Tatsunoko Production, 2013], an adaptation of Suzuhito Yasuda’s popular manga. A beautifully crafted production, YZQ is charming and tons of fun, fitting it nicely into my ratings at a 6/10 (Rankings).

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