An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

About

Schedule

New reviews of anime series are posted every Monday. Reviews of seasonal anime episodes are also posted weekly, but the day may vary depending on the airing day and time of the show. Additional material runs on Wednesday if it’s to be present. If there’s more than one ongoing project other than the Monday reviews, one will run on Wednesday and the other on another day to fit into the schedule nicely with the Monday and Wednesday content and Seasonal episodes.

What is the content like?

Reviews focus on an analytical approach — that is, I really like to take a show apart and dissect what makes it bad or good, and will probably talk at length about any topic. In addition to focusing on the material at hand, I may use it as a jumping-off point to discuss different styles and interpretations in media and theory about how to approach various topics in fiction such as what makes good humor or what makes the art of gore work, but in general I’ll keep such topics germane to the series at hand.

The Monday reviews will always be of, at the very minimum, a complete season of a show, and more often of a complete show. These reviews will always be full spoiler; I may not give a full play-by-play of everything that happens (they are reviews, not recaps), but I won’t keep anything in particular a secret. I like to think my tastes are fairly eclectic, so you can expect to see a variety of genres represented. Towards the end of most reviews I’ll give the show a letter grade on the a scale of F (or Fail) to A+, where any grade in the C bracket or above should probably be considered passing, though perhaps with heavy caveats for lower entries. Occasionally, I may simply rate a show on Pass/Fail grading, typically if there’s a reason a letter grade wouldn’t properly represent it.

Wednesday (or Assorted) entries can be just about anything; non-review analysis of a property, analysis or review of Japanese media other than Anime series, and so on. One particular project type is the “Audio Commentary” — these are videos (audio tracks, really) intended to be synchronized with a particular show, commenting on it live much like a certain television show did for cheesy science fiction movies.

Seasonal entries will be analytical reviews of a particular episode as it comes out. You can assume these will spoil the given episode and any earlier episodes, but not anything later as later episodes didn’t exist when a particular seasonal selection was written. I’ll often try to predict where a show is going and analyze what hurdles it will need to overcome to be good in the process of going over the episode at hand.

Why do you review the things you review?

The main reason I review something is that I have something to say about it.

To be a little more specific (and probably answer better the questions people actually had) I review older shows because I don’t personally think that the age of a show should matter when doing an in-depth analysis. Whether it finished its run last week or last decade, if it’s good and deserves to be watched then it is good and deserved to be watched. And whether it’s new and shiny or absolutely fossilized, if it’s bad and deserves to be ripped apart then it is bad and deserves to be ripped apart.

What’s more, some shows aren’t treated fairly by the times. There are, in my opinion, brilliant shows that have been largely forgotten, either because they came out at the wrong time (perhaps before anime really took off in the West, even), or because quite simply more things get forgotten by the popular consciousness than get remembered. And there are, in my opinion, shows that typically get remembered years and years after they came out that ought to be looked at again and have the assumption of their quality challenged, either because they haven’t aged well or managed to capture attention at the right time without actually providing substance. And of course, there are forgotten old shows that are forgotten for good reason and remembered ones that are remembered for good reason. It’s all worth taking a look at, at least as a reviewer.

That also informs another point: I don’t want to be the kind of reviewer who is always negative. Or the one that’s always positive for that matter, but on the internet I think that’s significantly rarer. I’ll take a look at good shows as well as bad ones, and try to praise what a show does right as well as insult what it does wrong. Keeping a balance, and being able to highlight everything whether it’s great, terrible, or in between is something I think is very important, and probably overlooked in general when it comes to criticism.

Further, I don’t think it’s fair to only focus on the good points of overall good material or only the bad points of overall bad material. It may sound like I’m really tearing something a new one, only for me to give it a moderately high grade in the end, and that’s because I think the grade is what it earned overall — if the negative comments consumed the body of the review, that’s because the negative element provided more interesting material to talk about, not because it was more important than everything that was done right or a whole package that worked despite it. The same, of course, goes for praise and low grades; it’s not impossible for a show that’s overall or on average weak or disappointing to do one element particularly well, even brilliantly, and sometimes that out-of-place element will be the one that’s most worth analyzing in depth.

Would you please review _______?

I’m more than happy to hear suggestions, but that doesn’t mean I’ll take them, especially not right away. If you have a show you’d like me to review, feel free to contact me and let me know. If you’re polite and it seems interesting, I may just look into it.

The only caveats are basically that it won’t be something I would never review normally. I won’t touch an ongoing show (though I might take it on once its run finishes) or a thousand-episode behemoth that I can’t reasonably watch the entirety of; it has to be somehow contained.