An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

What Comes After – Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka Spoiler Review

Here we are, technically one week into June, and I’m doing one last Magical Girl review to put something of a capstone on the month. The show in question is not a great classic, nor is it a landmark in the evolution of the genre. Rather, it is by its very existence a fascinating look at what has developed and how in terms of the Magical Girl genre. The show is, if the title was not a sufficient hint, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.

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Sacrifice, Despair, and Slice of Life – Yuki Yuna is a Hero Spoiler Review

The modern era of Magical Girl is still, essentially, “Post-Madoka” – there hasn’t been another game changer like Madoka Magica or Sailor Moon since, and so what remains is to analyze the themes and tropes of the genre as they exist. After Madoka hit, what did the Magical Girl genre do with it?

Some shows didn’t change a whole lot. It’s possible to get Magical Girl shows that reach to one side or the other of Madoka in terms of what influences they express. There are some harder to escape traits. Since Sailor Moon, the Magical Girl character herself has been more defined as a type of warrior, and since Madoka the image of what a Magical Girl is has more often included the idea that her powers are a burden, not a gift. Some shows play less with these aspects and some more, but when you think about a Magical Girl nowadays, chances are she wields weapons and has a heavy purpose. When speaking of shows that take more, especially from Madoka, though, you’ve got Yuki Yuna is a Hero.

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Kyuubey, I’ve Come to Bargain – Madoka Magica Spoiler Review

Last time when talking about Sailor Moon, I mentioned that there was another show that had to be addressed when it came to studying the growth and evolution of the Magical Girl genre. There are plenty of other big, famous landmarks in the genre, like Lyrical Nanoha or Pretty Cure, but the game-changing elephant in the room is Madoka Magica.

In some senses, it feels almost perfunctory to talk about Madoka, the same way it did to discuss Neon Genesis Evangelion. But as with Neon Genesis Evangelion, I need to establish a baseline to talk about other works, both the two remaining in the Magical Girl May series this year (yes, I’m actually going one week into June) and any other post-Madoka Magical Girl show I may choose to review in the future. So, let’s dig right in.

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Magical Girl Goes Action – Sailor Moon Crystal Spoiler Review

It’s impossible to talk about the history of the Magical Girl genre without talking about two shows in particular. One of those two (we’ll get to the other later) is Sailor Moon. The original series is notorious for two things. One is, allegedly, having a truly awe-inspiring sum of filler, both in terms of filler episodes and repeated battle and of course Transformation animations. The other is for transforming the nature of the Magical Girl genre by taking it from a branch of Adventure or even Slice of Life to one of action, blending the preexisting magical girl themes with those of transforming heroes and fighting hero teams. While Cardcaptor Sakura doesn’t show those influences, at least too much, every other Magical Girl show I’ll be reviewing this month has clearly felt, however distantly, the impact that Sailor Moon had.

The astute reader may note, though, that the title of this review does not simply say “Sailor Moon”. There’s a reason for that. I didn’t watch Sailor Moon when it was first coming out in the states, and hadn’t sought it out as part of my early years as an invested anime viewer. Rather, I knew it by reputation and knew that I had to look into it to really understand the Magical Girl genre. The thing is, the classic Sailor Moon had a five-year run and a grand total of two hundred episodes. I could have tried to cover the first season or arc, I suppose, but instead my research into the genre directed me towards a remake called Sailor Moon Crystal.

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“Release!” – Cardcaptor Sakura Spoiler Review


Welcome to another theme month – it’s May, so it’s time to take a look at Magical Girl anime! Specifically, I’d like to examine a few shows with an eye towards the history or evolution of the genre, including game-changers and reactions to them. To start that, though, I was put into a fairly awkward place: It’s quite hard to find a way to view most of the Magical Girl anime that were legitimately big before the debut of the original Sailor Moon, limiting my knowledge of what the early days of the genre were like to secondary sources. However, those secondary sources led me to one anime that, while it was technically a later release, is very much emblematic of what an entry in the genre would have looked like before Sailor Moon. That show is Cardcaptor Sakura.

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Awkward Inheritance – Aria the Scarlet Ammo Spoiler Review

The basic idea of Aria the Scarlet Ammo is simple: Our main character is Kinji Tooyama, who is enrolled in an academy for heavily-armed supercops called Butei. He’s not doing very well (not that he cares, he’s planning to drop out) but secretly possesses a special power: when he gets turned on, he enters a state called Hysteria Mode where he’s a chivalrous uber James Bond – Suave, hypercapable, and liable to say or do something that will embarrass Kinji later. He ends up paired up with the titular Aria, a Rie Kugimiya Tsundere who takes quick note of his moments of extreme ability but less so their trigger – typically her.

If this setup sounds like it’s going to provide a constant running awkward moment… it does. Depending on how you feel about that it could probably be the best thing since sliced bread or the 12th Circle of Hell. For me, it’s somewhere in between. I don’t enjoy awkward situations for their own sake, and typically think my tolerance is moderately low, but Aria mostly stayed within it, letting me have a good look at what’s going on underneath that.

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The Cooler Elfen Lied – Brynhildr in the Darkness Spoiler Review

Last week, I took a long look at Elfen Lied. Long story short… I didn’t particularly care for it. But there’s another show based on a manga by the author of Elfen Lied, one that I hear most people refer to as a knockoff of Elfen Lied, like it’s doing the same thing the way a lazy and uninventive sequel does: repackaged, reprocessed, and not as good as the first time around. So, since I was, to put it mildly, not a fan of Elfen Lied, you might think I’d have a bone to pick with Brynhildr as well.

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I Don’t Get It – Elfen Lied Spoiler Review.

Elfen Lied is a classic. By that, I mean that if you were a nerdy 90’s kid going to high school in the first half of the following decade or so, you were probably aware of a few anime shows by name even if you didn’t watch: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Beebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, and in all likelihood Elfen Lied would be among them.

Though I didn’t really get into anime until far later, at least in terms of shows rather than films like Princess Mononoke, that was basically my youth interface. I didn’t watch them owing to trouble finding copies or catching the right time slot in the days before streaming (with the exception of FMA –I watched it and in those days, we really believed its greatness was the world’s one and only truth) but I knew them by reputation, and their reputations were all more or less sterling… but to be taken with a grain of salt seeing as they were generated largely by other youths. Since really becoming a full fan of the art form as an adult, I’ve gone back now and then and watched the big names of the past with fresh eyes, as though to frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little understanding.

Some titles, such as Evangelion, have largely held up. They were praised then and they deserve praise now. Others, well… Others are Elfen Lied.

I try to not cuss in these reviews, but this time I make no promises.

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The Semicolon Seal of Fun – Robotics;Notes Spoiler Review

I imagine this was fairly expected given the April Fools’ Day “review” of Gunvarrel, but we’re going to take a look at Robotics;Notes this week. And I know March is over and my arbitrary Mecha theme with it, but while Robotics;Notes is at least tangentially related to mecha I don’t exactly see it as a Mecha show in the same vein as the ones I reviewed. As seen through Gunvarrel, that sort of stuff is still fictional in-universe. Instead, Robotics;Notes functions more as near-future science fiction story that just happens to include some giant robots.

It’s also one of the members of the “Science Adventure Series”, or “Semicolon Series” based on the idiosyncratic style of the titles (note, this one is “Robotics;Notes”, with a semicolon and no space. They are all like that.), the most famous of which would have to be Steins;Gate. The main entries, including Robotics;Notes, are adapted from Visual Novels and feature a shared universe. What’s more, they also share some general traits when it comes to storytelling. The members of the Semicolon series start off with a general sense that we’re feeling strange people in an essentially real world. Some have darker or lighter baselines than others, but they tend to have a turn somewhere in there that catapults the story from personal drama to the world or at least regional scale in terms of what’s at stake. They tend to be a solid blend of Science Fiction, Mystery, and occasionally Thriller in terms of their genre, but are seldom short on funny (or at least fun) moments, thanks to fairly colorful casts. They overall try to be pretty grounded, and while the science fiction that they present isn’t exactly hard the presentation is extremely artful when it comes to convincing the audience that this is something that could happen. Part of this comes from the tendency of the series to lift elements of its plot and science fiction components from the murkier corners of the real world, including psuedoscience, conspiracy theories, unexplained mysteries, and scientific wishful thinking about unproven properties of the universe. The audience is likely to be passing-familiar with some of the topics, or at least to have heard of them, possibly even in terms that lend credence to the show’s take.

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