An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: August 2025

Anime Film Club – Spoiler Review

What can I say to introduce <harmony/> that I haven’t said about a show in the past? I waxed long about dystopian fiction and the reactionary fear of the science fiction genre introducing Love and Lies, and while I could reword my lengthy digression, that would seem a little cheap.

For those who don’t want to follow the link and read the whole long thing, I’ll give the super-basic summary: dystopian fiction is pretty common, and arguably for good reason because conflict makes good stories and thus utopias aren’t much fun. But it’s still, philosophically, a frustration with lots of entries in the Science Fiction genre. <harmony/> is arguably another.

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Drifting Artists – Jellyfish Can’t Swim In The Night Spoiler Review

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is an oddly-titled tale of four girls trying to make it as… not a band exactly, but a musical/creative sort of group.  the biggest issue, of course, is that all these girls have massive issues that need to be worked through if they’re ever to be happy or successful.  It’s a tried and true formula, but there’s no reason to hold that against this fairly recent outing.

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A Song of Wind and Not Much Else – The Pilot’s Love Song Spoiler Review

Aeronautical worlds, while hardly unknown in fantasy, often feel kind of fresh and magical. Maybe it’s just easy to make the sky – and mysteries in it – seem magical, especially in visual media that can give you vast sweeping shots of cloudscapes or a good sense of motion. Miyazaki’s love of flying scenes is well known (with Castle in the Sky being perhaps a template for the aerial fantasy), but you get other properties that dive into it like Granblue Fantasy, Skies of Arcadia, Last Exile, or this week’s topic, The Pilot’s Love Song.

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Anime Film Club: Living with Undeath – Summer Ghost Spoiler Review

Summer Ghost was a treat. Honestly, I’m shocked I didn’t talk about it before: I was fortunate enough to screen it at AX a few years back, and I knew from that I had to get the home video release. But I guess I wasn’t doing daily reports that year, because I’ve yet to mention it on the blog, meaning it stands as one of the big incentives for me doing this film club.

And I know, cat’s out of the bag, I thought it was good. At not even 40 minutes long, this is going to be a pretty quick review, so I might as well spoil what’s at the end of the spoilers, at least a little.

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