An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Seasonal Selection – Tower of God Episode 6

I actually found this episode to be one of the more interesting lately, since it wasn’t focused primarily on the action, and featured (in addition to some mechanical exposition) some good growth and exploration of our characters. Not Bam, but I’m coming around to the idea that this is one of those stories where our lead is more or less supposed to be a window into the cool and creative things we’re going to see while personally staying on the more bland end in order to not throw the audience out of their element or upstage the actual feature.

Read More…Read More…

“Release!” – Cardcaptor Sakura Spoiler Review


Welcome to another theme month – it’s May, so it’s time to take a look at Magical Girl anime! Specifically, I’d like to examine a few shows with an eye towards the history or evolution of the genre, including game-changers and reactions to them. To start that, though, I was put into a fairly awkward place: It’s quite hard to find a way to view most of the Magical Girl anime that were legitimately big before the debut of the original Sailor Moon, limiting my knowledge of what the early days of the genre were like to secondary sources. However, those secondary sources led me to one anime that, while it was technically a later release, is very much emblematic of what an entry in the genre would have looked like before Sailor Moon. That show is Cardcaptor Sakura.

Read More…Read More…