An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Give me a moment… – Kokkoku Spoiler Review

Not enough time for a review? ZA WARUDO!

… For those of you who don’t speak meme, we’re going to be talking about a show centered around the supernatural power of stopping time. As the title indicates, this one is Kokkoku, sometimes with a subtitle as Kokkoku: Moment by Moment.

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Somebody Give This Show A Hand – Hand Shakers Spoiler Review

One of the things I love about anime is that, despite having it’s own hellishly overused setups, the medium in general doesn’t seem to be afraid to turn out the occasional piece with an absolutely insane concept. Nothing is too specific or too stupid… and with creativity and effort, a lot of studios can make it work. We’ve seen shows where clothing is an evil alien plot, a show where teenagers body swap via kiss, a show where Earth is overrun by gribbly black monsters that can only be fought by incarnate musical scores, a show that somehow manages twelve episodes of a kidnapped princess trying to get better sleep, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

But just because way more crazy ideas do work than some folks would expect doesn’t mean that they all work; that creativity and effort are key; throwing some bland idiot into a fantasy universe with a modern smartphone adapted to the setting?  That didn’t pan out. Super-teenagers who power up by getting horny to fight lust-eating bug monsters?  About as awkward as it sounds and somehow even less amusing. Stuffing a tecnophobe’s brain into a weird black-box ultratech device, giving him super hacking powers? Worst. Anime. Ever. And I don’t think I can even summarize half the madness that went into Penguindrum, but suffice to say it didn’t stick the landing in my eyes.

What I’m getting at here is that Hand Shakers – a show that forces our lead pair to have mystical death battles while also forcing them to continuously hold hands – was not, I repeat not, dead on arrival. No, Hand Shakers was murdered. Let’s try to find the culprit, shall we?

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The One Only For… – Chobits Spoiler Review

Boy meets girl. Man meets machine. Sixteen years before Beatless there was another show about a boy pretty much stumbling across a robot girl, falling in love with her, and discovering that even among robots she’s something special. That show is Chobits, and it’s based on a manga by CLAMP, a group with several notorious winners including (that I’ve reviewed) Cardcaptor Sakura and Angelic Layer.

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Fragment of Nothing – Glasslip Spoiler Review

In 2014, Studio P.A. Works made Glasslip, a story about a group of friends in a world that’s at least somewhat mystical despite otherwise seeming like it belongs to the familiar, whose lives and dynamics are disrupted – possibly for the better – by the arrival of a stranger to their clique, with a heavy focus on the romances within the group. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you could bump the year up by four and change the name to Iroduku and give the same introduction.

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The Government Demands You Kiss the Girl – Love and Lies Spoiler Review

Why do we like dystopias so much?

When you get down to it, despite a reputation for being high-flying and forward-looking, science fiction more often indulges in – and often seems to be consumed by – not hope for the future or wonder at the possibilities of scientific advancement, but rather fear. Fear of the future, fear of technology, fear of the unknown, the works. For every inventive gadget or futuristic concept mankind dreams up there’s almost sure to be a scifi story about why this is a terrible idea and going to kill and/or enslave everybody. It often seems as though the genre of the future would rather flee into the past, delivering lesson after lesson about how anything that changes the status quo is bad, to the point where real people view emerging technology with extra heaps of fear and suspicion specifically because every time it crops up in fiction it’s somehow evil.

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