An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

SyntheThighs – Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout The Animation Spoiler Review

Ryza, Ryza, Ryza… there’s a reason I always have to mention when I bring it up that Atelier is a fairly venerable series with many editions and nearly as many protagonists, and that would be because it got a huge signal boost from the game (and later, games – plural) featuring Reisalin Stout, aka Ryza, as the main protagonist. It was darn near impossible for a long while to escape seeing or hearing anything about her, and even now that her trilogy is probably complete and Atelier looks to go on to new protagonists, she’s probably who folks are going to think about as synonymous with the series for a long while. Everybody loves Ryza… or at least, her thighs.

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Magical Deserts & Desserts – Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky Spoiler Review

So, back in the Fall 2022 season, I took a look at Managment of a Novice Alchemist as my seasonal anime of choice, and I opened up likening the pitch to the venerable Atelier series of games. In a sense, this was the elephant in the room: Atelier already had an anime outing back in 2014. The other elephant in the room, which I partially addressed, would be the massive popularity of Ryza. She got her own anime outing in Summer 2023, and we’ll talk about it in due time. For now, though, it’s Escha and Logy.

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School of Corporate Knocks – Classroom☆Crisis Spoiler Review

Ah, school anime: a topic so prolific that even though I typically run September as Back to School Month, I’ve got to look into it during the rest of the year as well if I’m to have any hope of addressing the sheer quantity of its offerings.

Classroom Crisis (I will be omitting the star at my discretion) at least tries to keep its academic scenario somewhat fresh by placing it on a future Mars colony. It’s also an anime original property, rather than one that initially came from its manga or light novel outings. But with bigger ambitions come bigger expectations, and a show needs to take care to not let its pitch write checks that its content can’t cash. How does Classroom Crisis hold up?

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Asimov Coffee Shop – Time of Eve Spoiler Review

Robots certainly are a hot topic. And when talking about near-future robots, the kind of thing you might believe we could actually see, there are some interesting takes. Take the “maid robot” idea for instance. On the surface, this is pretty appealing since it would amount to taking modern robot vacuum cleaners and making them way more capable and aesthetically pleasing. I would love a robot to do actually dusting and tidying up and if it looks nice, that’s a perk.

But when you start to question what a robot, especially an advanced robot, is, things get a little fuzzier. Sure your robot vacuum is a pretty simple unintelligent automaton, but something that’s made in the image of a human and intended to interact like a human? At what point does a being like that have an existence that deserves respect as an equal, rather than continuing on as a machine? As AI models get ever better scores on their Turing tests, we have to wonder.

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DESTINY! – Mawaru Penguindrum Spoiler Review

IMAGINE!

Imagine a setting where nothing makes sense. Something that blends the irreverent bombast of an early Trigger production like Kill la Kill with the philosophizing fakery of an “important talks” heavy show like RahXephon or Aquarion and the extreme visual coding and glaring technique of a Shaft production like Bakemonogatari. And there are penguins.

You don’t have to imagine it. Mawaru Penguindrum exists, in all its stunningly pretentious glory. Well, for a definition of glory, at least.

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Let’s Ghost! – Dark Gathering Spoiler Review

Let’s finish the spooky season strong with some ghosts and ghouls ripped from the rumor mills and brought to horrible, horrible life upon the screen. Let’s talk about Dark Gathering.

At its heart, Dark Gathering is a show about a little girl, Yayoi, who is determined to make a ghost buster of herself in order to hunt down the spook that took her mother’s soul. Her methodology is pretty unique, though, as she captures lesser ghosts, stuffs them in mystic substitute dolls so that anything spooky that tries to hurt her will damage the dolls instead, and ultimately trains them up to fight for her, making Yayoi basically the ultimate Ghost-type Pokemon Master.

However, Yayoi is not the main character.

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Respect for the Classics – Ayakashi: Japanese Classic Horror Spoiler Review

Ayakashi is an anthology of, as the title would suggest, classic Japanese horror tales. So strap yourselves in and get ready for a slice of period spookiness.

Specifically, across its 11 episode run, Ayakashi covers three stories: “Tenshu Monogatari”, “Yotsuya Kaidan”, and “Bakeneko”. The last of these is notable because it gives Ayakashi its dubious claim to fame: technically being the predecessor to the show Mononoke, which is often regarded as one of the all-time greats, but is beyond the scope of this review.

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7 Minute Monsters – Kagewani (& Shou) Spoiler Review

Kagewani is a story about monsters. It wants to be something new and refreshing: neither the tale nor the monsters seem to be derived from any other source material, providing a wholly original matter. The tale is spun across two seasons, Kagewani and Kagewani: Shou, with a grand total of twenty six episodes.

Each of those episodes averages about seven minutes of running time, though. Bold choice, let’s see if that pays off for them.

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