An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Let’s Do The Kaiju Time Warp – Godzilla: Singular Point Spoiler Review

Have I mentioned that I love Godzilla? I didn’t just watch a couple Godzilla movies when I was a kid, I watched all of them – then the entirety of the Showa and Heisei series, as well as the TriStar version that we’d be better off forgetting. While I may not be 100% any more on the Millennium and MonsterVerse outings, I still have a deep affection for the character, and that whether in more dark and dramatic outings (like the original known as “King of the Monsters” in its American recut, Shin Godzilla, or the recognition-earning Minus One) or whether it’s in pure Tokusatsu cheese (like Destroy All Monsters or Godzilla vs. Mothra). I even have some affection for the really campy stuff like Godzilla vs. Megalon.

So, suffice to say, with my affection for the big screen outings whether suitmation or CGI, I was pretty excited to see the King of the Monsters getting a fresh animated series outing. And I do mean a fresh one – for those who don’t know, there were two older American animated versions, a Hanna-Barbera version from the late 70’s and one from the late 90’s that tried its best to redeem the TriStar continuity. But we’re not here today for Godzooky or ‘Zilla (nor the late 2010s animated films, which are “maybe some day” fare for this blog), we’re here for what was pitched as a new, original take on the classic Kaiju in Godzilla: Singular Point.

I will try to stamp down my fanboy urges as we go through this one, but I can’t promise that I’ll never slip.

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Sky Fairy Dormitory – WorldEnd: What are You Doing at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? Spoiler Review

WorldEnd (I am not typing out that whole title every time) is a post-apocalyptic tale that’s pitched to be a little more… complete than most, starring as it does Willem Kmetsch, said in this setting to be the last surviving human. The grim oppression of such a scenario, as would be familiar to the likes of Girls’ Last Tour or a few downer endings, is defused significantly by the setting and supporting cast.

For one, while humans are basically extinct, civilization endures with other humanoid races on a series of islands floating in the sky – mostly animal people as we see when Willem intercepts a mysterious blue-haired girl and shows her around for a day, hats required to hide that they don’t have horns or anything.

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Crash & Burn – The Magnificent Kotobuki Spoiler Review

What is The Magnificent Kotobuki?

It’s a show I don’t think many people of heard of. Heck, this is my job and it managed to fly under my radar until now, no pun intended. It’s an anime original, which is usually interesting, a sort of Aeronautical/Flying Ace themed variant on the Western, what with the show starting in the spitting image of an old-timey saloon.

In its pitch, it promises a sort of military action adventure. In its style, it promises a sort of “cute girls doing cute things” overtone and we can just all hope that it pans out more like High School Fleet than the Mecha Musume shows.

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I Dream of Demons – Dream Eater Merry Spoiler Review

Dream Eater Merry is… actually hard to put in a nutshell. It came out in 2011, based on a manga that ran from 2008 all the way to 2020 (so naturally the one season we have will not be covering the whole thing). Its style and aesthetic feels as though it’s in a transitional phase between the heavier shadows of the early 2000’s and the bright colors and high white saturation you’d tend to see later in the 2010’s.

As to its concept, like many good concepts it’s at once wildly original and done to death overdone. On one side, we get the “monster who fights monsters”, and to extent the backbone of the masquerade supernatural battler, the sort of thing that was around long before Shakugan no Shana but that Shana made really popular. On the other hand, dealing with exiles from the world of dreams as they intrude upon, practically invade the physical world, overtaking humans as they do? I have to admit, I haven’t heard that exact pitch before.

Which is kind of interesting. Dreams are a funny thing – though we can put high confidence on the idea that they’re just processions of junk data before the mind’s eye, we can’t really prove or in fact explain much about them, and not for lack of trying. The idea that the sleeping mind connects to something real and beyond common human experience, as well as a mystical significance to dreams, is as old as dirt. The idea of something from the other side bodily crossing over to cause trouble isn’t exactly novel either, but making that the backbone of an action-adventure story? It’s a different sort of action-adventure story.

Let’s not waste any more time, and dig in to Dream Eater Merry.

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Lesson 1: How to Not Write a Shoujo Fantasy RomCom – I Want to Escape From Princess Lessons Spoiler Review

Alas for the Fantasy genre. As a branch of speculative fiction, it’s meant to be a wild playground for the imagination. The genre of myth, magic, monsters, and all sorts of unreal things… has been concentrated, codified, and reprocessed into focus-group friendly form, so that finding something creative and different when the only limit is the creator’s imagination is just as hard as finding it in more grounded genres, if not harder.

In the land of Anime, when the word “fantasy” is uttered these days the first of these ultraprocessed bricks of content to come to mind is no doubt the Shounen Power Fantasy Harem Video Game Isekai Fantasy, and while at times I have defended that good things can come out of even such an overplayed formula, I’ve also dredged up enough of the dreck of the genre combination for the time being.

But there is another repeatable demographic that I’m sure marketing teams love that also exists within the Fantasy space of the Anime sphere: the shoujo fantasy romance. It still takes place in what’s usually a quasi-period setting almost but not quite entirely unlike Europe, but rather than the ages of knights and heroes, it’s more the ages of ball gowns and courtly intrigue, a world in the style of Louis XIV’s Versailles rather than the Dragon Quest series. The stories, rather than being about “the strongest” trouncing monsters, demons, or anyone whose face he doesn’t like with some ultimate cheat power, will instead usually focus on the leading lady in some troubled relationship (whether it has trouble forming or trouble maintaining), with high rank and prestige on one side if not both, ranging from Cinderella stories to the sordid polygons of the Otome Games that call this particular portion of Fantasy home.

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Sleepless in High School – Insomniacs After School Spoiler Review

Sleep troubles suck. I’m mostly going to leave it at that since the more outre and sensational cases of insomnia become the sorts of things that you end up losing sleep over, but suffice to say that it’s seldom a pleasant condition.

This week’s subject, Insomniacs after school, is about a pair of kids with sleep issues, learning to appreciate the silver lining of the night and getting to know each other in the process. Unlike a certain other after hours show that will not be mentioned again this review, this one features no blood-sucking, but it should be engaging all the same.

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Everything Becomes Locked Room Murders – The Perfect Insider Spoiler Review

It’s no secret, I enjoy a good mystery. Detective fiction is hard to produce, resulting in some very notable misfires, but at the same time when it’s at its best it’s the greatest game between creator and audience there could ever be.

And, one of the greatest staples of mysteries is the Locked Room Murder: a murder committed in a setting where, with the location of the corpse locked from the inside, no culprit should have been able to get in or out of. Locked Room Murder mysteries, done well, always lead to some wonderful, creative, and often sordid solutions.

Without further adieu, The Perfect Insider.

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Livestream Call of Cthulhu – Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show Spoiler Review

When last season began, I had a decision between Kamitsubaki City Under Construction and this show, in terms of what I wanted to do my seasonal write-ups for. In the end, I decided to go with Kamitsubaki City and leave Necronomico for exactly this moment. So in a sense you could say that it informed my decision to do a Lovecraft month this October at all.

I’ve saved it for last, in part because working ahead meant starting October reviews before Necronomico even finished airing and in part because I feel like digging into this show – that not a lot of people seem to have watched despite it being newer and that tanked itself on debuts thanks to initially airing to Westerners with cruddy AI subs – was going to be a little bigger or perhaps more meaningful than my other entries.

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Apartment Cthulhu – Housing Complex C Spoiler Review

Housing Complex C (sometimes “Apartment Complex C”, or by the Japanese title, C Danchi) is a four-episode ONA. Airing in 2022, it presents as a Lovecraftian horror story, perhaps with a creep kids angle

When it comes to a month dedicated to Lovecraft in Anime, any show that can have its first line stand as “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu” – a fragment of Lovecraft’s most famous alien-speak chant – at least deserves to be here.

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