Aniwords – What’s the Best Anime of the Season?

September 15, 2015iblessall 8 Comments

Oh, I hear your voices already. “Bless, you’ve already sold out to straight-up lazy clickbait titles and topics?” “So you only really care about views after all—I thought you were different!” “Umm…you do remember that you do end of season rankings, right?”

To which I say, “Ha! Fooled ya!”

I’ll admit this is a title straight up designed to get people to click, but I promise you it’s not for my own affirmation—it’s for something bigger. Namely, the Animator Expo. Now, I’m not a exactly a sakuga buff or a huge industry nerd, but I am invested in this industry and the places it’s going. And I think that path is set out before in the shape of this project. And I honestly think it’s important people take notice. So I went for the hot sell; the easy-in; the rope ’em up strategy. All to get people to watch a weird 7-minute short about a pair of dorky sisters.

Here’s the link~

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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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Animator Expo Impressions (Part 3)

April 1, 2015March 31, 2015iblessall Leave a comment

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.

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Animator Expo Impressions (Part 2)

January 23, 2015January 23, 2015iblessall 2 Comments

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, 10 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

On these five shorts as a whole: Overall, I was a bigger fan of this set of shorts than the last. We basically got three music videos in this bunch, a format I think lends itself really naturally to the kind of creative experimentation that the Expo seems to want to encourage. Having “Tomorrow from there”—easily by favorite short thus far—in this group definitely bumps it up a notch, but (unlike the first batch) I genuinely enjoyed every short on this list and would recommend checking out each of them.

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Animator Expo Impressions (Part 1)

December 5, 2014January 23, 2015iblessall 4 Comments

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.

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