An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: October 2019

Ghost Stories Are What You Make Of Them – Dusk Maiden of Amnesia Spoiler Review

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a sweet, funny romance between Niiya Teiichi and Yuuko Kanoe, complicated by the fact that the latter just happens to be a ghost. Wait, that’s not it…

What I meant to say is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a character-driven mystery, following the ghost girl Yuuko-san as she and the members of the Paranormal Investigation Club attempt to discover the truth behind her death. Hm, that’s not quite right either…

The truth is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a dark and twisted, heavily psychological ghost story, exploring both the past and present of the haunting of a certain school, delving into sordid tales and dangerous manifestations of supernatural vengeance. Er, you know the drill by now…

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is all those things, held together by some brilliant avant-garde cinematography, a beautiful palette of fall colors and deep shadows, and a wealth of engaging characters in what would normally be considered a very small cast.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 4

Just as I was talking about the need for a more Sakura Empire/Red Axis episode, we get an episode heavily focused on the Sakura Empire. True, we still got a couple scenes with Enterprise and Belfast as well as the other Azur Lane characters, but the meat or the episode is spent in Sakura territory, dealing with their intrigues.

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Mafia is Not a Good Game to LARP – “Another” Spoiler Review

Another is a slow-burn Mystery/Horror type of show. It’s somewhat similar to the Final Destination series (at least as far as I know the series, which is getting the premise and having seen one film out of it) in that the horror comes not from any sort of monster or serial killer, but rather from fate conspiring to cause deaths. Where it meets success or failure is the fact that once the horror really turns on, it goes all the way with the gore. On one hand, Another does have its fundamentals down better than some other shows I could name. On the other hand, the over-the-top Rube Goldberg demises could easily come across as unintentional comedy. Where on the spectrum does Another fall?

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 3

So, even in Azur Lane, an anime set entirely in ocean and oceanside environments and about the humanoid incarnations of warships, there must be a beach episode. I guess that checks out: the game gives you the option of a lot of swimsuit costumes for the girls, and the previous shipgirl show I watched, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, managed to work in a ‘beach episode’ as well. The question is not whether or not it’s here, but how it was used.

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Psychics, Robots, and Ninjas, oh my! – Blackfox Spoiler Review

Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing. The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard the basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge. Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s very much real. The question is, is it any good?

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For My Next Trick, The Inverting Frown! – Magical Sempai Spoiler Review

Magical Sempai (and that is the romanization they go with. I’ll try to stick to it.) is a mildly ecchi comedy about high school students populating a club dedicated to stage magic. The show mostly follows the point of view of Assistant (he doesn’t get a name) as he deals with Sempai (she doesn’t get a name either) and her attempts to put on various magic tricks despite her many failings. These failures are always embarrassing in some manner, often involve a self-inflicted wardrobe malfunction, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t at least a little bit funny some of the time.

The center of pretty much all the show’s comedy is Sempai. She’s the only member of the Magic Club at the start of the show and… they say she has crippling stage fright, but it’s more often treated just like she has crippling incompetence since she has no problems getting up in front of audiences, whether just Assistant or actual crowds, to fail time and time again. Whatever the cause, the effect is that Sempai screws up every trick she attempts, usually in an overwhelmingly pathetic manner. For instance, she can attempt a rope escape only to end up more securely hog tied than she started out, throw the coin she wants to make disappear (at which point she falls over herself trying to get it back), forget her marked envelopes for a ‘mind reading’ trick, and the rest of the cast quickly learns to not lend her any money for bill cuts. When it comes to putting on a really wonderful magic show, Shiny Chariot she ain’t.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 2

At some point, I have to question what I’m expecting out of Azur Lane. To an extent, this is a question for any show, as you attempt to determine what the ambition of the creators was. It would be pure madness to try to hold everything to the same standards. For Azur Lane, I think the evidence is mounting that there is at least some real desire to tell a war story, even surrounded as it is by a lot of fanservice of every kind.

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