anime

[miffy495]

It's kind of glorious. I also love that it's subtitled with the lyrics, even though said lyrics are just "pikachu pikachu pi ka chu!"

[Gormongous]

Well, I've found a way to go lower than my unapologetic love of Upotte!!, an ecchi anime about anthropomorphic assault rifles attending an all-girls (and all-guns) school. This season, the same studio is making Keijo!!!!!!!!, an anime about a near future in which the most popular sport is sumo wrestling... between young women in swimsuits, where the only legal forms of contact are using boobs and butt.

 

It's trashy as hell, with Kotaku calling it "wretched" simply for being an anime about boobs and butts, but it's actually... good? Enjoyable, at least. Stay with me here. Yeah, it's full of fan service, especially the kind that involves butts surging towards the camera or boobs jiggling wildly, but in its premise and plotting, Keijo!!!!!!!! is a bog-standard shounen-structured sports anime. There's the plucky young protagonist who was inspired by seeing her heroes fight. She has a group of friends upon which she relies, all of whom have exactly two personality traits, one in-battle and one out of it. There's an elite class at her butt-wrestling school, full of sinister characters whose powers escalate in potency with comical alacrity: the first antagonist to whom we're introduced knocks out her opponents with a single supersonic hit to the jaw with her butt, a later one uses her boobs to hypnotize people, and so on. I realized that I was genuinely enjoying the show, instead of just ironically enjoying it with an uncomfortable eye towards the fan service, when it was revealed in the third episode that the protagonist accidentally used a move called the "Vacuum Butt Cannon" during a sparring match. A teacher pulls her aside and says that this is perhaps the most powerful move in Keijo!!!!!!!!, if one can master it, but that it destroys your hips and will leave you a paraplegic by your thirties. Heavy!

 

The thing is, all of these are the most universally applied tropes in the shounen fighting/sports genre and Keijo!!!!!!!! only deviates from them by replacing "baseball" with "butt-wrestling" and "fist" with "boob." A character was just introduced who has the same "semi-sentient muscles" thing that Baki's father had in Baki the Grappler, except it's her butt instead of his back. I find it really interesting, in both good and bad ways, that some people who seem to have a lot of experience with anime have no problem with the shounen formula until the fighting or sport is replaced with fan service, at which point the formula's suddenly an insult for how shallow it is. Personally, I can't imagine watching Keijo!!!!!!!! for titillation: there's so much fan service and it's presented with such seriousness that it quickly becomes normalized, at least within the context of the show itself, as a natural and ineluctable collateral of the "sport." It's weird, but I'm excited to see where it goes!

[SecretAsianMan]

Continuing my pattern of watching a popular thing well after the discussion has been concluded, I watched all of One Punch Man.  I enjoyed it overall.  Fairly predictable in many ways but I wasn't expecting anything especially surprising.  There's a handful of characters I find fairly off-putting but conversely there are many characters I really liked.  I think the thing that amuses me most of all is just the idea that on a (purportedly) action show the actions scenes are probably the least interesting bits, or at least not the parts I look forward to.

[Cyborg771]

1 hour ago, SecretAsianMan said:

Continuing my pattern of watching a popular thing well after the discussion has been concluded, I watched all of One Punch Man.  I enjoyed it overall.  Fairly predictable in many ways but I wasn't expecting anything especially surprising.  There's a handful of characters I find fairly off-putting but conversely there are many characters I really liked.  I think the thing that amuses me most of all is just the idea that on a (purportedly) action show the actions scenes are probably the least interesting bits, or at least not the parts I look forward to.

 

The writer of OPM had another of his works adapted last season, Mob Psycho 100. OPM gets a lot more attention but I think Mob Psycho does a much better job conveying his ideas about talent and value that OPM kinda stumbles over. It also has some of the most gorgeous non-traditional animation I've ever seen. I enjoyed OPM as an animation spectacle but I enjoyed Mob Psycho's story a lot more. 

[Gormongous]

Well, thus ends the first time ever that I've watched multiple shows throughout the season in which they air. March Comes in Like a Lion will continue for another cour, but it already impresses for its mature plotting, a definite improvement over the manga author's previous work Honey & Clover, and its exploration of young genius that puts me in mind of Your Lie in April, only directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and animated by Shaft.

 

WWW.Working!! is the closest to actual dreck that I'm watching. I'm still a couple episodes out from the end, since I'm following it through a fansub group rather than streaming, but it's been abundantly clear since the second or third episode that you just can't capture the magic of Working!! by choosing another restaurant with a different cast of implausibly dysfunctional people. It doesn't help that the main couple has awful chemistry, since the idea is that she hates cooking but keeps trying because he doesn't believe in her, even though her food makes him sick, is just... not funny and more than a little dumb. If people finish Working!! and want more of the same, I'd direct them to watch Servant x Service and then, if they must, watch Working!! again before turning to this lifeless, derivative spinoff.

 

Keijo!!!!!!!! stayed true to its premise all the way through, and I couldn't be happier. If you're so starved for sexual images and phrases that literally anything will do, I can imagine watching it for titillation, but the show's really about reducing the rhythms of the shounen formula and the presentation of sexualized fan service to nonsense through semantic satiation, the better to provide raw entertainment. It works! By the end, I wasn't even seeing the boobs and butts, just following a series of fights as ridiculous as those in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure but with the sexual tension made explicit. Really, my only complaint is that Xebec clearly blew out their budget in the previous few episodes, so that the finale is largely pans over stills, computerized distortion of stills, and low-tweening animation that struggles to stay on model. I had actually been thinking, while watching the penultimate episode, that Xebec was punching above its weight in terms of visuals, and now I see why. It's a shame they couldn't hold back a little and have a few visually average episodes rather than several visually stunning episodes and one miserable one. Ah well!

 

Finally, I finished Fune wo Amu last night. This is a odd one, about a small group of people working on a dictionary over the course of a dozen or so years at a mid-size publisher. I picked it up because I like procedural plots in anime and because the manga author who wrote Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu worked on it (although he did not write it, as I had initially thought), and... well, overall it was good. I learned a lot about the process of assembling lists of words and transforming them into a dictionary, as well as the specific pressures of doing so at a Japanese publisher that receives no public funding for it, and I would have been satisfied, except that the finale implied that I was supposed to have read a lot of that process as an allegory for the characters making connections and pursuing their dreams, which wasn't quite there. The main character, Majime, is a shy man who struggles with his awkwardness, and there's the implication at the end that his work on the dictionary helped him to overcome it by learning how to communicate better... only Majime is well-spoken from the first episode and his awkwardness comes almost entirely from a lack of self-awareness in social situations, physical clumsiness, and a general cluelessness, which no increase and refinement of vocabulary should be able to fix. There are plenty of stylized scenes making it explicit that people are separated by a sea of misunderstandings and that dictionaries, made of words, are the ships with which we cross them, but it's a clear example of telling and not showing, just as much as Majime's inexplicably offscreen romance of his landlady's granddaughter. Similarly, Majime talks at the end about having butted heads with Nishioka, a salaryman at the publisher who's just there for a paycheck in the beginning but gradually learns the value of the dictionary and therefore his coworkers, but they basically never butted heads. Nishioka starts out thinking that Majime is a weird word-obsessed dork, but there's no reconciliation of opposing principles, he just stops thinking that on his own once he gets to know Majime better. Don't get me wrong, I wish that Fune wo Amu were a character study of people learning to speak their hearts, as well as a nitty-gritty depiction of making a dictionary, but it can't be, not in only eleven episodes, and it actually made the final episode less enjoyable for the show to return to dwelling so much on those half-baked themes.

 

That's it, happy holidays!

[Cure4thitch]

Hello hello!

It's almost time to say farewell to this season of Hibike! Euphonium (Sound! Euphonium). I can't say I'm sure what to expect, it seemed like a lot of things were wrapped up last week. Time will tell, I suppose. I'm going to miss having new stories to witness each week though.

[Gormongous]

On 12/24/2016 at 1:55 PM, Gormongous said:

WWW.Working!! is the closest to actual dreck that I'm watching. I'm still a couple episodes out from the end, since I'm following it through a fansub group rather than streaming, but it's been abundantly clear since the second or third episode that you just can't capture the magic of Working!! by choosing another restaurant with a different cast of implausibly dysfunctional people. It doesn't help that the main couple has awful chemistry, since the idea is that she hates cooking but keeps trying because he doesn't believe in her, even though her food makes him sick, is just... not funny and more than a little dumb. If people finish Working!! and want more of the same, I'd direct them to watch Servant x Service and then, if they must, watch Working!! again before turning to this lifeless, derivative spinoff.

 

Finished WWW.Working!! and the finale didn't fail to disappoint even my basement-level expectations. This is just my opinion, but if the central thrust of your romantic subplot involves a nearly-grown character being unaware not only of the link between kissing and dating, but the link between love and dating, then it's time to go back to the drawing board. Same if the resolution of your love triangle involves one character just... getting over it one day, for no reason, and giving up, without ever really making a move. The lender/debtor romance and the spooky girl romance were fine, but the show spent more than half of its running time on this rude girl who wants to become better at cooking out of spite and this bland guy who puts up with her because reasons, so that's what I'm basing most of my judgment on. Honestly, it's unbelievable that the source material comes from the same author as the Working!! manga.

[Zeusthecat]

Anime! I've watched a bunch of stuff recently.

 

Clannad and Clannad After Story

It took awhile but I finally did make it through both of these. Overall, I didn't really enjoy Clannad very much and After Story was only marginally better up until the last half of it. Somehow though, they managed to shift the tone and focus of the show in just the right way in the second half of the series that it really resonated with me emotionally. I think it even produced a tear or two, which is why I wanted to watch in the first place.

 

The dumb high school setting with dumb high school hijinks and coma ghost girls and genius girls and all the other cliche stuff fell really flat for me. Luckily I have a whole shitload of patience and was able to push through the main Clannad storylines. After Story got a tad bit better once they got to the post high school part of the story but even then it was just really drab and uninteresting. There were a few entertaining moments here and there, mostly with the main girl's parents (I've forgotten all of the names by now) but I didn't have high hopes for it turning around. But somehow it did, and in the second half, it drastically shifted gears and had a lot of really touching and poignant moments. For a show that completely failed to get me invested in its characters, it managed to pull off one of the most gut-wrenching, and unpredictable arcs I have seen. Although it kind of copped out at the very end, it made its impact and I'm glad I watched. I have never been so glad to feel so sad.

 

Knights of Sidonia Season 2

This show was fairly enjoyable, but I had to go back and read some Wikis to understand what the hell was going on with certain characters. The Gauna didn't feel as terrifying as it did in Season 1 which was a bit of a bummer but there were a lot of cool action scenes and I continue to enjoy the weird mix of realism that is thrown into this wacky ass show. I still don't know what the hell is up with the hybrid that has a friendly appendage that travels through the city sewer system and sleeps with the main characters, I don't know why certain characters had the tips of their fingers sliced off and were then perfectly fine, but also possessed by the memories of a dead dude (or something like that?), and I don't know why that girl that died in season 1 ended up naked inside of the main character's gundam thingy after being secreted out of the Crimson Moth thingy. I kind of just enjoy this show as a thing that I build my own interpretation of. I hope the bear starts getting in on the action soon.

 

Ajin: Demi-Human

This was mediocre at best. The animation and art style actually bothered me a lot in this show and it was a rare case where it actually got in the way of me enjoying the show. It is somewhat interesting how the main character is basically a sociopath but still kind of a hero and I think they could go to some interesting places with that, but after season 1, I'm not so sure. I guess its cool that they haven't gotten too cliche yet and he hasn't really had any significant moment of redemption, just selfish decisions that happened to work out well for some of the other characters. I don't know, I worry that they are going to turn this into some major torture porn based on some of the threats that have been issued by certain characters. As it stands, it is already a little too heavy with that stuff. I see season 2 is out now but I don't think I'm interested enough to bother.

 

Your Lie in April

This was absolutely fantastic and has already become one of my favorite anime of all time. It was so good that I watched it through twice and got my wife into it. The music is so beautiful. The way they dangle this potential love story in front of you the entire time and never give any kind of payoff was brilliant and made it actually feel super believable. And that ending was so powerful and unexpected. I definitely cried more than once while watching this show.

 

Another great touch was how the main character was basically a hero to all of his rivals. I worried at first that they would basically be "the bad guys", but the show quickly established them as interesting and compassionate characters that wanted nothing more than to be inspired once again by the main character the way they were the first time they heard him and to motivate them to get better. Considering how much I have disliked other shows that portray high school and middle school kids, I was pleasantly surprised by how realistically these kids were portrayed. Maybe realistic is a little strong considering kids that young would probably never be that mature but still.

 

My only complaint is that this show did not go on for long enough. They could have easily stretched it out another 10 episodes and it still would have felt short.

 

Gurren Lagann

I liked what this show was doing for awhile and thought it was some good, dumb fun. And then they went and killed the most interesting character in the show less than halfway through. Fuck that. I was also a little embarrassed to watch this in front of my wife because they went a little overboard with the boobies thing. But not in a winking Space Dandy kind of way. Here it was just gross.

 

I also just watched through Steins;Gate again, probably for the 4th time now. It's definitely my number one anime by a lot. I really hope the new Steins;Gate visual novel gets adapted into a season 2 of sorts for this show because I hear it's really good.

[Gormongous]

I'm watching a bunch of shows that are currently airing again, although I don't really have much to say about them right now. Kuzu no Honkai is angling to be the best of the bunch, but it's very dark and emotional even just three episodes in, so it's hard to recommend.

 

In terms of older series, I've had a run of good luck the past couple months. I watched Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, an anime from 1991 that was the first full-length series Anno Hideaki directed. I'd been meaning to watch it for years and kept putting it off because an anime inspired by the works of Jules Verne seemed boring to me. Man, I was wrong. There is so much wonder and joy in every episode, especially in the two young leads Jean and Nadia. Anno and GAINAX really captured the feeling of a new age of discovery wherein anything could turn out to be possible. Jean's inventions, Nadia's past, Nemo and the Nautilus, and the threat of the Neo-Atlanteans are all tailored perfectly to feed into that feeling. At the same time, it's also balanced by a certain pessimism, the idea that great things were achieved in the past and nothing good came of it, and that's why, even though this anime has Miyazaki's fingerprints all over it, I'm glad that Anno directed Nadia. His personal beliefs about technology being the intersection between hope and despair work well with the themes of the anime, as does his love for the operational details of weapons and other machines. Also, the OP and ED have the clean and full emotion that I expected from his other works, from Gunbuster and Neon Genesis Evangelion to His & Her Circumstances. Seriously, for all of their simplicity, are these not totally charming?

 

 

 

Of course, the problem with Nadia is that it's a two-cour anime that was forced to take a third cour because of how successful it was. It's said that Anno, who hated working on the project, had his infamous breakdown around episode 22 when he got the news, and it shows that the storyboard artist Higuchi Shinji had to take over as director there. The remaining episodes (which the internet terms the "Island" and "Africa" episodes) are not only boring but roll back the characters' growth to buy more time in the story. Jean becomes a dope, Nadia becomes a harpy, etc. Then the ending rushes in out of nowhere and, without the nostalgic pitch of the epilogue, I'd feel hard done by the anime. Still, I didn't, and overall Nadia is interesting and beautiful on its own, as well as a great primer on Anno's budding interests in classic sci-fi from the seventies, be it Space Battleship Yamato or the British TV series UFO, and in "hidden histories" like Gnosticism and the Kabbalah.

 

Then I watched Barakamon, which was a very healing anime about which I don't have too much to say. It captured the feeling of being a success in life but not knowing how that success was reached? I liked it, it was just what I needed.

 

After the New Year, I watched Taisho Baseball Girls, which was about some mid-1920s schoolgirls forming a baseball team against the wishes of authorities and society in order to prove that women could compete on the same level as men. For an anime that bases most of its appeal on its period trappings, it has a lot of anachronisms and modern tropes, but it was still a fairly good time. I'm not usually big on J.C. Staff productions, they seem like a studio to which you license your property if you want the anime to look good but not have any signature style, but they pulled it off here, at least.

 

And finally, most recently, I finished NieA_7. This anime is an odd one, from the same team that made Serial Experiments Lain, and in terms of audio and visual direction they're almost identical. The only difference is that NieA_7 is a comedy, albeit a black comedy, about mental illness, isolation, and codependency. It stars Mayu, a hardworking student who's possibly drowning under the weight of her depression, and NieA, an unemployed alien who lives with Mayu and mooches off of her. They live in a struggling bathhouse in the poorer part of town, next to the slums where the aliens live, and most of the episodes just focus on daily life. The word is that the team made this to "cool off" after the intensity of Lain, and that boggles my mind. Mayu is crushingly poor and, despite being successful in school, is probably going to drop out eventually because of that. She tries to keep her depression under control, but having to look after NieA, who presents as severely schizophrenic, makes that impossible. She's lonely because the people around her exhaust her, but she can't be rid of them, else she'll be even more alone. It's a miserable show, but also gorgeous and full of a longing that is really unique in media. It puts me in mind of Yamada in Honey & Clover or Rei in March Comes in Like a Lion, but without the promise of healing that those characters have. It's just someone surviving, but rendered with such verisimilitude. I wish the ending were stronger, because it doesn't really follow through with the themes that I described above, but I'm still glad that I watched it. You should, too.

 

Now I'm watching Eureka Seven, a dumb anime about surfing robots that occasionally expresses a desire to be a smart anime about war crimes, alien life, and finding oneself. I'm thirty episodes into its fifty-one episode run and it hasn't managed to shed the former identity for the latter, but it has given me one of my favorite anime couples: Charles and Ray Beams! Look at the late-era disco style of these two mercenaries.

 

 

Okay, I'm done.

[Roderick]

Most of the anime I watch is along with my gf, but there are a few series that have caught my eye and some that I'm currently watching with great pleasure:

 

Ms. Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: It's wonderful slice of life whimsicalness. Dragons that change into maids and other assorted anime characters (a school-going child, a co-worker), and it all centers around the mostly quiet, casually dour person of miss Kobayashi, who has won my heart with her down-to-earthness. There's no big storyline here, just cute little nothings with maid Tohru doing her best to please her self-appointed mistress, interspersed with brief moments of gravitas. Very fun to watch.

 

 

Digimon Tri: Watching this because Digimon is teenage nostalgia. Having said that, boy it starts out rough. The animation quality is not what I expected from a highly anticipated 'several movies split up into episodes' return to the original cast. It looks pretty cheap and it takes the whole first movie before it gets into a groove. The problem is that it's all Earth-based instead of Digimon World-based, and the high school struggles just don't get off the ground. The digimon don't get enough screentime at first, and the drama is so poorly developed that I was yawning throughout. I persisted because it's Digimon, but if you have no nostalgia about it, it's best to steer clear.

 

Gundam Wing: Never watched this before, but I am now because some friends started a shared viewing on Crunchyroll. First two episodes were pretty hilarious. My only reference point to Gundam is the amazing Thunderbolt. Wing, in comparison, is ludicrous silliness. Teenage angst in hyperdrive. Within the span of one episode, characters who minutes ago had never met are proclaiming that they'll kill each other, they're jumping up buildings and crashing down torpedos left and right. But: it's pretty well animated and I adore its 90s style and sensibilities. The overt tsundere-ness of Relena is even rather charming in how clumsily it's pushed.

[Gormongous]

Your Name finally came to theaters in town and I saw it. It was lovely, through and through. Honestly, I used to worry that Shinkai Makoto didn't seem to be growing as a storyteller like he was growing as a visual artist and director: the only movie he'd made that didn't drink deeply from the well of youthful nostalgia, mature regret, and the irrevocability of time was Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, easily his most derivative, boring, and empty. Even after seeing Garden of Words, which was a beautifully compact and restrained story, I was prepared to respond to all claims of Shinkai being the next Miyazaki with the more prudent assessment that he'd already run out of juice and that 5 Centimeters per Second was his high-water mark.

 

I'm happy to be wrong. Your Name not only continues the tradition of Japan making body-swap stories that are actually good (for more evidence, see the TV series Kokoro Connect, which is incredibly underrated) but, more significantly, it shows that Shinkai has vastly improved his own ability to drive home themes through his characters and the actions that develop them. As good as 5 Centimeters per Second is, its power trades on the universal resonance of certain premises and moments: the ill-conceived trip to visit a friend, the realization that the object of your crush is not going to return your feelings, the flash of recognition of an old love who's forgotten you. We don't need vividly realized characters to sell these things to us because we've all been there... or have had friends and family who've been there, at least. Body-swap framework aside, Your Name also has these premises and moments, but they're fitted seamlessly into a story and characters that can all stand on their own. You'd think that we wouldn't get a great sense of who Taki and Mitsuha are, since we're dividing screentime between the two of them and each has their screentime divided between the two persons alternately inhabiting their body, but Shinkai demonstrates that economy of direction was not just a one-off experiment of his in Garden of Words. We see who these characters are, and who they become when they're someone else, in brief but lovingly detailed vignettes that simultaneously speak to the commonalities and to the specificities of human experience. It's so good and, while it's not my favorite work by Shinkai because the pessimism and loneliness of 5 Centimeters per Second appeals to me so much, it's definitely his best, no question about it. It deserves every ounce of praise that it's gotten and, Shinkai's stated desire that neither the movie nor the praise exist, it's one anime movie that virtually everyone should make the time to see.

[Gormongous]

Also, I've made fun of it for years and downloaded it as a joke, but I'm two-thirds through the All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku OVA and it's actually been flawlessly entertaining? It's like a non-sleazy Mahoromatic, pulled off with the dumb joy of a post-Akira anime that thought the most outrageous premise could sell if done right. Nuku Nuku is literally a cat given form as a teenage girl, and she works perfectly, but the real attraction is the antagonist, the jilted ex-wife and ex-employer of Nuku Nuku's creator. She's done with such a canny and sympathetic hand that it's impossible not to cheer for her, even though she rightly loses every confrontation, violent or peaceful. I could watch a dozen more episodes of the OVA, in addition to the four that I have watched and the two that I've yet to watch, and I'd be excited that there's both a TV series and a spiritual sequel... but the community is radically divided on the quality of them, so I can't let myself get excited. Then again, the community is radically divided on the quality of the OVA that I'm watching and loving right now, so who knows!

[SecretAsianMan]

A friend of mine has started me watching My Hero Academia.  Apart from being extremely predictable I'm finding a majority of the main cast irritating.  I rewatched One Punch Man on Netflix a couple weeks ago and I was way more into that.  I've been binging a lot of superhero stuff lately (the Arrowverse shows and the Netflix Marvel stuff) and I'm getting burned out on the whole thing.  Unless this gets way more interesting real soon, I might stop.

 

On ‎4‎/‎3‎/‎2017 at 9:20 AM, Roderick said:

Gundam Wing: Never watched this before, but I am now because some friends started a shared viewing on Crunchyroll. First two episodes were pretty hilarious. My only reference point to Gundam is the amazing Thunderbolt. Wing, in comparison, is ludicrous silliness. Teenage angst in hyperdrive. Within the span of one episode, characters who minutes ago had never met are proclaiming that they'll kill each other, they're jumping up buildings and crashing down torpedos left and right. But: it's pretty well animated and I adore its 90s style and sensibilities. The overt tsundere-ness of Relena is even rather charming in how clumsily it's pushed.

 

Shamefully Wing is the only Gundam series I've seen from start to finish (including the OVA, Endless Waltz).  I like the design of the Gundams a lot (although I never got the point of Sandrock) but you're totally right about the story and characters.

[Roderick]

Gormongous, I saw Your Name last week, and I fully support your view. I've not seen many other things from the director, apart from his earliest short some 15 years ago, and a longer story about... a girl fighting in mecha on alien worlds, while her boyfriend is still stuck in Japan in eternal train rides or somesuch? I forget.

 

In any case, Your Name has some terrific characterizations going. And it's delightful how it switches up things at certain moments that throw everything you've seen before in a different light. On top of everything that's going on, the film also has the confidence to allow for moments of rest and quiet, to offer the viewer a moment of contemplation to unpack what's been going on. That alone makes for fun jumps on the sofa: wait, does that mean that we've been following X instead of X??

[Gormongous]

On 5/1/2017 at 5:43 AM, Roderick said:

Gormongous, I saw Your Name last week, and I fully support your view. I've not seen many other things from the director, apart his earliest short soms 15 years ago, and a longer story about... a girl fighting in mecha on alien worlds, while her boyfriend is still stuck in Japan in eternal train rides or some such? I forget.

 

Yeah, that's Voices of a Distant Star. It has some nice moments, especially the genesis of Shinkai's twin fixations on long-distance communication and travel, but it's mostly interesting to me as one of anime's few truly auteur works. It was written, directed, animated, and voiced by Shinkai himself, all on his G4. It shows, in a bad way, but it's still worth watching. Actually, my hope is that the success of Your Name helps Shinkai's early stuff (She and Her Cat, Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days) become as available as Children who Chase Lost Voices and Garden of Words have always been.

[DocRandal]

Saw Your Name last week, and concur that it was an excellent, well balanced story even if the creator considered it an unfinished work. Now I'm glad that this thread is here so I can mine it for other excellent anime recommendations.

[Roderick]

I have been seriously enjoying KADO: The Right Answer. It's running right now on Crunchyroll and it's very cool sciencefiction, devoid of any tropes. Frequently I don't even know what to expect next, because it refuses to follow any standard dramatic build-up, instead only following the conseuqences of its weird premise of a superdimensional being coming to Earth to distribute his amazing gifts to mankind. Also he travels in a weird giant cube. If that sounds like a good time, then KADO is for you!

[Twig]

I started watching it 'cause of your recommendation, Roderick, and boy oh boy I'm glad I did. I never would've even considered it were it not for you. Thanks!! I'll have more thoughts to share later. (Possibly/probably even on Key Frames! I'll defo write somethign up here, too, though, once I've fully caught up.)

 

OH OH hey maybe if you feel like it write into keyframespodcast@gmail.com with questions or comments so we can respond. :3 :3 :3

 

(sorry we're bad at promoting and i'm trying to be more proactive and shilly sorry sorry not sorry)

[Gormongous]

14 minutes ago, Twig said:

OH OH hey maybe if you feel like it write into keyframespodcast@gmail.com with questions or comments so we can respond. :3 :3 :3

 

(sorry we're bad at promoting and i'm trying to be more proactive and shilly sorry sorry not sorry)

 

Once we're on iTunes, I'll get us a Facebook page and start running our Twitter more sanely. It'll be good, I promise.

[Roderick]

Oooohhhh, I'm writing the review for KADO in AniWay (Dutch J-culture mag), so once I wrap the series up I'll have some thoughts probably. Do remind me when that time comes, 'cause I'm super busy and will 100% guaranteed forget to do this!

[Roderick]

URRRGGGHHHH, KADO!

 

 

I am so torn and disappointed at the latest turn of this show. It was doing so brilliantly, and then it just went WHOOP. It's a very double feeling. On the one hand, I LOVE the hardcore scifi explanation they've given (and how they've developed it) of the anisotropic world and unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Hot shit, very true to the show and its scifi premise. But the drama that unfolds directly after this is disastrously awful. It is fantasy bullshit of the highest order: suddenly we're in superbeings flinging energy bolts at each other territory. WHYYY? It's such a betrayal of all of KADO's sensibilities so far. Looking back, it paints the whole show in a dubious light. It has consistently refused to develop any meaningful drama around its human components, but I assumed this was because they were going for a slow burn. Slowly working their way to a meaningful conflict of interests between the ever-mysterious zaShunina and humanity, with Shindo in the middle. Instead, it now turns out it never wanted to tell that story at all, but chooses to focus on a conflict between two anisotropic beings. With a silly twist that one of the characters was superdimensional all this time. This is grade A bullshit. There are a million shows that do this fantasy nonsense, but KADO should have been more and better.

There's also something profoundly disappointing (about the universe and the apparent lack of imagination of its creators) that at the end of the road, the godly, superdimensional beings turn out to be motivated like ordinary humans, not at all different from us. Boring. I doubt they'll be able to wrap this up well in the one or two episodes left.

 

[Twig]

lol it's like you're echoing everything i said on our last recording about episode 9's ending

 

i did come around though, and i think it's handled The Twist well

[Roderick]

Not out yet though, is it? Keyframes ep 14 is the latest one. It's not surprising that we share this feeling of disappointment. Perhaps I'll turn around as well, but it may just take a bit because I so dearly loved KADO all throughout.

[Twig]

Yeah it'll come out next Monday; we're releasing every two weeks. Though I'm hoping we shift it so we record more close to release, since we're often talking currently airing stuff. Not, like, all the time. But often enough.

 

Anyway.

 

The main issue is I hate editing. Woop woop!

[Gormongous]

25 minutes ago, Twig said:

Yeah it'll come out next Monday; we're releasing every two weeks. Though I'm hoping we shift it so we record more close to release, since we're often talking currently airing stuff. Not, like, all the time. But often enough.

 

That's the plan! Since we're recording more regularly, timeliness becomes more of an issue.

 

I keep meaning to post stuff here. I watched Love Lab and it was fine. ACCA ended up being a disappointment to me. Little Witch Academia has finally gotten good but I think it's taken too long and I find the villain to be risibly obvious anyway. I'm watching my first series-length Gundam, Turn A Gundam, and it's weirdly amazing? Although I got to a cross-dressing confusion episode last week and I haven't watched it since. I really wish I hadn't committed to another fifty-episode series after the bloated letdown that was Eureka Seven, because I'm really jonesing to finish up the last two sequels to Crest of the Stars, which are as good as Legend of Galactic Heroes in terms of surprisingly humanistic anime space opera but seem to be vastly underrated compared to it.