An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: August 2026

Based on a Taira Story – The Heike Story Spoiler Review

The Taira Clan is an interesting part of Japanese history. I imagine there’s a fair set of Westerners who have heard of them who have done so through a love of Japanese spooks and thus the infamous Taira no Masakado. But, there’s history behind the ghost story, itself both widely reported and significantly mythologized, mostly do do with the eventual conflict between the Taira and their rivals, the Minamoto.

The two clans are also known as the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto), and their clash, the Genpei War, did a lot of heavy lifting to shape the history of Japan. Though the Minamoto were the ultimate victors, The Tale of Heike is one of the most famed (and period) literary accounts of the war. The Heike Story promises to provide a take on the aged epic.

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Anime Film Club: Biorobotics 110 – Make a Girl Spoiler Review

Robot romances are a kind of interesting little genre, aren’t they? At least to me, it’s somewhat fascinating that there’s this very specific cluster of tropes surrounding a very particular relationship between humans and technology, yet somehow still a lot of good variation.

In different ways, to different degrees, I’ve covered this kind of material in Planetarian, Time of Eve, Dusk Beyond the End of the World, Armitage III, the classic Chobits, and – my personal favorite of the selection I’ve reviewed – Beatless. Haruhi as my witness, that’s not even a comprehensive list of all the ones I’ve reviewed that could count. There’s just something about boy meets mechanical girl that seems to have struck enough of a chord for repetition, iteration, and frankly a few pretty good shows.

Make a Girl, however, might be the most straightforward execution of the topic. Or, at least, that’s the pitch.

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Don’t Make a Deal with the Schoolgirl Devil – Engage Kiss Spoiler Review

When I read the pitch for Engage Kiss, I felt something nagging at me. It promised to be a supernatural urban fantasy battle anime, with the oddly-overused “unique” setting of a mega-float city in the Pacific, with a solid love polygon theme, skewing Harem of course. Seems harmless enough, so why is there creeping dread running down my spine?

… If anyone says “This is our fight” at a climax as their big line, I’m going to crack.

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Multiverse of Melancholy – Sonny Boy Spoiler Review

You know what, no intro this time. The show doesn’t give us one, why should I?

We begin with a school having already been transported. Where? Kind of nowhere. That is to say, absolutely nowhere, a black void that surrounds it and that has bestowed supernatural powers on some of the thirty-some students. We meet quite a few of these folks in short order: lackadaisical boy Nagara and offbeat girl Nozomi seem to be our leads, more or less doing their own thing while everyone else tries to invoke or avoid a Lord of the Flies scenario.

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