An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: December 2023

Eighteen Years, and Dead No Longer – Erased Spoiler Review

Hm… unless I miss my mark, there’s some kind of festival going on right now. Usually, I give everyone a present by cracking into some of the worst stuff (or at least the stuff that ticks me off) and digging into it, but this year, I think I’ll give people looking for good anime to watch a present and review Erased.

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Blast from the… 2023?! – Giant Beasts of Ars Spoiler Review

So, when you look back at older Fantasy, in a certain time frame for anime and a different one for Western media, there’s this palpable “anything goes” feeling to it. You’d be introduced to weird worlds that don’t respect any sort of conventions about technology or story format or these ideas of a standard “fantasy” that have largely emerged across the genre. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a work that will buck the current trends. For anime in 2023 that sometimes feels practically wedded to the Video Game Rules Universe, and only slightly less tightly bound to Isekai and/or Harem, Giant Beasts of Ars is the blast from the past and/or breath of fresh air that marches to the beat of its own drum.

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Ecchi Express – Rail Wars! Spoiler Review

Rail Wars! (the title is excited) is another in a long, long line of shows that try distinct themselves by doing the exact same thing all the others do: serving up a double-d helping of ecchi eye candy to hint at romantic overtones even if the core material doesn’t really have romance in its genre DNA. To be fair, some of the shows like that are at least okay, like the better end of the classical battle school harem bracket, but especially when the show has ecchi but not romance, it does need something to provide the meat of the material rather than just the lovely and usually bouncy gravy that is the fanservice.

Rail Wars! has, um, trains. I guess.

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Nausicaa in White – Kaina of the Great Snow Sea Spoiler Review

It should come as no surprise, given I’ve put down my thoughts on selected Ghibli films that I’m something of a fan of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, particularly in its true and massive Manga form. So, when I see something like Kaina of the Great Snow Sea, where the apple hardly falls from the tree to say nothing of falling far, I typically come in with some mixed feelings. On the one side, there’s an impulse to see more versions and reflections of something great. If you like a work, it’s only natural to also like things that are similar to it. But if it’s a half-assed attempt that can’t really keep up and bring its own material to the table, well… it’s probably worse than being unrelated and of similar quality.

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