An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: October 2023

Seeing is Believing – Mieruko-chan Spoiler Review

Well, we’re at the end of October, and as much as I’d love to lead the armies of Halloween to reclaim calendar territory from the Christmas occupation forces no doubt already sighted all over the place, such an effort is quite beyond me. Thus, it’s best to wrap up the spooky season with a few more choice ghouls and ghosts. The ones seen in Mieruko-chan will do just fine.

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Werewolves versus Cirtus Fruit – Okamikakushi: Masque of the Wolf Spoiler Review

It’s still October and the relative low quantity of horror anime be damned, I’m doing all spooky shows for it this year! Well, we’ve seen ghosts, vampires, and… weird Victorian soot faeries, guess we might as well give werewolves a shot as well.

Okamikakushi is a show that kind of looks like a game of Werewolf: you’re in a town, there are wolves, and it seems like somebody gets murdered every night under the perpetually-full and always blood-red moon while by day we try to solve the mystery.

In some ways, though, the traditional pattern is placed in reverse.

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Soot, Shadows, and Secrets – Shadows House Spoiler Review

It’s still spooky time, but this week we’re taking a look at something a little less conventional: a gothic tale not about any familiar ghosts or ghouls yet still, on at least one side, still familiar to its genre.

Shadows House takes place within the confines and grounds of an ambiguously Victorian mansion. The lords and ladies of the House are the Shadows family, who are notable for being absolutely black, such that no features can be discerned upon their surface. Because of this, the Shadows have “living dolls”, attendants with what the viewer would regard as normal human features who, among other things, act as the faces of the Shadows, giving expressions to the otherwise unreadable entities.

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At Least it’s not Collect – Call of the Night Spoiler Review

Well, while we’re in the month of maximum spookiness, what better subject could there be than Vampires? I’ve talked about the notorious nosferatu before, notably in the lamentable A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives and the somewhat less awful Lunar Legend Tsukihime. In fact, I even referenced the vampires here in the opening of the former review. So it only seems fitting that now that we’ve come around to everyone’s favorite season for vampires (your mileage may vary), I ought to take a look at Call of the Night.

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Seasonal Selection – The Gene of AI Episode 12 (End)

I accept this as an ending and yet part of me wants more.

This episode is almost entirely about Sudo and Risa working out their feelings as Sudo prepares to leave for a war-torn hellhole to search for his mother’s copy. Anything about searching for or finding the copy, or the upgrade to Michi that precipitated all this and for which Michi clearly wants Sudo to have this experience for (or die trying) is left out of the content of the show.

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