An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: November 2019

Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 8

Enterprise is having a bad day.

I mean, everyone’s kind of having a bad day today, what with being caught in a sea full of crumbling ice mountains and ever more shattered-window holes in the sky just sort of leaking reality out into an infinite star field, but Enterprise’s day in particular seems kind of terrible especially since she’s spending a good deal of it not really being herself. I guess Kaga might have her beat, depending on how you look at it…

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Love, Murder, and Godhood – Mirai Nikki Spoiler Review (plus Redial)

This is it, the show that revels in everything dark and twisted. From its very premise, Mirai Nikki promises death, mayhem, and bloodshed and boy does it ever deliver. This may not be literally the bloodiest show I’ve ever seen, nor the one with the highest body count of characters with speaking roles (though it’s at least a solid competitor on both scores), but it absolutely and without reservation leverages its gore and brutality to create a cohesive and uncompromising image of itself and its world.

Normally, I don’t tend to gravitate towards shows that are this brutal, but that’s not so much out of having a problem with dark stuff as it is having a problem with darkness for the sake of darkness, which is a trap far too many media products fall into. You can go as miserable as you want, as long as there’s some sort of reason for it… and Mirai Nikki, at least, has plenty of reason.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 7

Welcome back Azur Lane. We missed you. The week of break seems to have done a world of good in terms of getting the animation quality under control, getting us a big action-heavy episode with few if any of the derpy zoom-out shots and, as if to try to balance out episode 6, basically no extra fanservice slipped in. The result is an episode that feels a little story-light but that does properly represent a turning point and a solid beginning for the second half of the show.

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How is Something so Goofy so Deep and Complex? – Planet With Spoiler Review

What kind of media do you think kids should be exposed to?

It’s a complicated question, with a lot of factors to consider. How old a kid are we talking about? Do they have any pre-existing interests? Is it a boy or a girl? Does that even matter? And even answering those questions, I don’t think you’re going to find a consensus of any sort and far be it from me to supply one.

I do, of course, have an opinion on the matter, as I must consider about this time of year when I have younger family members. I find that I’m of the camp where I feel that younger consumers of media can take, or possibly even need, material that has a creative intelligence and serious approach to its subject matter and the world even if that means going dark places or risking some emotional confusion. I kind of think about things like The Last Unicorn, The Neverending Story, Don Bluth films from before the 1990s like The Land Before Time or Secret of NIMH, most if not all of Miyazaki’s filmography… and I think Planet With belongs on the list somewhere.

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What if God Were a Bratty Teenage Girl? – The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

(In the voice of Rod Serling) “Picture of a boy, Kyon by name, starting his first day of High School and looking forward to an uneventful and unremarkable academic career. But this young man is about to make a very particular acquaintance: Haruhi Suzumiya isn’t interested in the mundane goings-on of an average high school but rather in the strange and fantastical. Aliens, Espers, and Future Men are her bread and butter. Impossible things? Perhaps. But as Kyon is about to find out, what Haruhi wants, Haruhi gets. Kyon’s school life is going to become very eventful and remarkable indeed, as he’s all set to join a new club with its meeting room… in the Twilight Zone.”

Ah, yes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – a colorful comedy with a premise that is, in fact, like something right out of a classic Twilight Zone episode. Somehow, it’s simultaneously one of the most unique shows I’ve seen and also one of the most cliched. That alone is an accomplishment, but accomplishments don’t always mean something good. Let’s take a look.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 6

After last time, we get a breather episode! As predicted, the last events on mist-shrouded island are resolved before the opening, and after that we’re all back at port with nothing more needed to execute the escape. The rest of the episode… remains at port, eschewing the fighting for a double (or more) helping of Azur Lane’s fanservice.

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Guilty Crown Audio Commentary

Welcome to our second Harper Anime Reviews Audio Commentary — that thing where we watch a show and talk over it but you can only hear the talky bits hand have to supply the show yourself (Or don’t, if the talking is fun on its own). This time we’re diving into Guilty Crown.

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Jerk Comedy and Isekai Redeem Each Other – KonoSuba (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

I’ve got trouble with “Jerk” Comedy. That is, comedy predicated on all the main characters being not just crazy or foolish but outright terrible people. A jerk can be funny used in the right way at the right time, but they often don’t hold up as main characters or whole casts.

I’ve also got trouble with Isekai. I used to think that, as a genre, it was perhaps overly maligned; the basic conceit of travel from the mundane world to one of fantastical remoteness is the backbone of countless works of literature, many of which (like “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Chronicles of Narnia”) are considered classics. That was before I realized just how prolific the genre really is in anime, just how reprocessed and regurgitated its tropes are, and just how frustrating it is when you find yourself trapped between the failure state in which the world revolves utterly around the main character’s quest and the one in which you would much rather have a native character who was germane to the setting instead. There is such a thing as good Isekai, but Sturgeon’s Law really does apply.

So why do I enjoy KonoSuba so darn much?

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