An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Cute Ghost Girl and the Lazy Formula – Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs Spoiler Review

To start off, a word of what we’re getting into: this show is probably something like 90% Ecchi Harem Comedy and 10% Light Action. There’s not a ton of meat to the product, and what there is has a lot of standard notes. So, in some ways, rather than looking at this as a review of an individual show, I want to examine the formula. What works, why it works, and what we should jolly well expect better from instead. This is still going to be primarily an analysis of the show at hand, but it’s standard enough that I want to keep an eye open for what’s done the same everywhere and why.

It’s also worth a note that I prefer to get my Anime through legal streaming means. There are a lot of them, but this ranks a notice here because the one I knew to use for Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs happened to be Crunchyroll and the version there is censored – there are a lot of scenes where a good amount of screen is taken up by extra thick steam or magical beams of heavenly light. And for the purposes of reviewing a show, I think that’s perfectly fine. While nudity can be used in an effective manner for storytelling and atmosphere (and was in shows I’ve previously reviewed, like Mirai Nikki), I’m personally of the opinion that if a show can’t survive without drawings of nipples, well, then it was dead on arrival.

Those programming notes out of the way, let’s talk about Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs.

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Love, Murder, and Godhood – Mirai Nikki Spoiler Review (plus Redial)

This is it, the show that revels in everything dark and twisted. From its very premise, Mirai Nikki promises death, mayhem, and bloodshed and boy does it ever deliver. This may not be literally the bloodiest show I’ve ever seen, nor the one with the highest body count of characters with speaking roles (though it’s at least a solid competitor on both scores), but it absolutely and without reservation leverages its gore and brutality to create a cohesive and uncompromising image of itself and its world.

Normally, I don’t tend to gravitate towards shows that are this brutal, but that’s not so much out of having a problem with dark stuff as it is having a problem with darkness for the sake of darkness, which is a trap far too many media products fall into. You can go as miserable as you want, as long as there’s some sort of reason for it… and Mirai Nikki, at least, has plenty of reason.

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How is Something so Goofy so Deep and Complex? – Planet With Spoiler Review

What kind of media do you think kids should be exposed to?

It’s a complicated question, with a lot of factors to consider. How old a kid are we talking about? Do they have any pre-existing interests? Is it a boy or a girl? Does that even matter? And even answering those questions, I don’t think you’re going to find a consensus of any sort and far be it from me to supply one.

I do, of course, have an opinion on the matter, as I must consider about this time of year when I have younger family members. I find that I’m of the camp where I feel that younger consumers of media can take, or possibly even need, material that has a creative intelligence and serious approach to its subject matter and the world even if that means going dark places or risking some emotional confusion. I kind of think about things like The Last Unicorn, The Neverending Story, Don Bluth films from before the 1990s like The Land Before Time or Secret of NIMH, most if not all of Miyazaki’s filmography… and I think Planet With belongs on the list somewhere.

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What if God Were a Bratty Teenage Girl? – The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

(In the voice of Rod Serling) “Picture of a boy, Kyon by name, starting his first day of High School and looking forward to an uneventful and unremarkable academic career. But this young man is about to make a very particular acquaintance: Haruhi Suzumiya isn’t interested in the mundane goings-on of an average high school but rather in the strange and fantastical. Aliens, Espers, and Future Men are her bread and butter. Impossible things? Perhaps. But as Kyon is about to find out, what Haruhi wants, Haruhi gets. Kyon’s school life is going to become very eventful and remarkable indeed, as he’s all set to join a new club with its meeting room… in the Twilight Zone.”

Ah, yes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – a colorful comedy with a premise that is, in fact, like something right out of a classic Twilight Zone episode. Somehow, it’s simultaneously one of the most unique shows I’ve seen and also one of the most cliched. That alone is an accomplishment, but accomplishments don’t always mean something good. Let’s take a look.

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Jerk Comedy and Isekai Redeem Each Other – KonoSuba (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

I’ve got trouble with “Jerk” Comedy. That is, comedy predicated on all the main characters being not just crazy or foolish but outright terrible people. A jerk can be funny used in the right way at the right time, but they often don’t hold up as main characters or whole casts.

I’ve also got trouble with Isekai. I used to think that, as a genre, it was perhaps overly maligned; the basic conceit of travel from the mundane world to one of fantastical remoteness is the backbone of countless works of literature, many of which (like “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Chronicles of Narnia”) are considered classics. That was before I realized just how prolific the genre really is in anime, just how reprocessed and regurgitated its tropes are, and just how frustrating it is when you find yourself trapped between the failure state in which the world revolves utterly around the main character’s quest and the one in which you would much rather have a native character who was germane to the setting instead. There is such a thing as good Isekai, but Sturgeon’s Law really does apply.

So why do I enjoy KonoSuba so darn much?

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Ghost Stories Are What You Make Of Them – Dusk Maiden of Amnesia Spoiler Review

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a sweet, funny romance between Niiya Teiichi and Yuuko Kanoe, complicated by the fact that the latter just happens to be a ghost. Wait, that’s not it…

What I meant to say is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a character-driven mystery, following the ghost girl Yuuko-san as she and the members of the Paranormal Investigation Club attempt to discover the truth behind her death. Hm, that’s not quite right either…

The truth is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a dark and twisted, heavily psychological ghost story, exploring both the past and present of the haunting of a certain school, delving into sordid tales and dangerous manifestations of supernatural vengeance. Er, you know the drill by now…

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is all those things, held together by some brilliant avant-garde cinematography, a beautiful palette of fall colors and deep shadows, and a wealth of engaging characters in what would normally be considered a very small cast.

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Mafia is Not a Good Game to LARP – “Another” Spoiler Review

Another is a slow-burn Mystery/Horror type of show. It’s somewhat similar to the Final Destination series (at least as far as I know the series, which is getting the premise and having seen one film out of it) in that the horror comes not from any sort of monster or serial killer, but rather from fate conspiring to cause deaths. Where it meets success or failure is the fact that once the horror really turns on, it goes all the way with the gore. On one hand, Another does have its fundamentals down better than some other shows I could name. On the other hand, the over-the-top Rube Goldberg demises could easily come across as unintentional comedy. Where on the spectrum does Another fall?

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Psychics, Robots, and Ninjas, oh my! – Blackfox Spoiler Review

Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing. The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard the basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge. Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s very much real. The question is, is it any good?

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For My Next Trick, The Inverting Frown! – Magical Sempai Spoiler Review

Magical Sempai (and that is the romanization they go with. I’ll try to stick to it.) is a mildly ecchi comedy about high school students populating a club dedicated to stage magic. The show mostly follows the point of view of Assistant (he doesn’t get a name) as he deals with Sempai (she doesn’t get a name either) and her attempts to put on various magic tricks despite her many failings. These failures are always embarrassing in some manner, often involve a self-inflicted wardrobe malfunction, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t at least a little bit funny some of the time.

The center of pretty much all the show’s comedy is Sempai. She’s the only member of the Magic Club at the start of the show and… they say she has crippling stage fright, but it’s more often treated just like she has crippling incompetence since she has no problems getting up in front of audiences, whether just Assistant or actual crowds, to fail time and time again. Whatever the cause, the effect is that Sempai screws up every trick she attempts, usually in an overwhelmingly pathetic manner. For instance, she can attempt a rope escape only to end up more securely hog tied than she started out, throw the coin she wants to make disappear (at which point she falls over herself trying to get it back), forget her marked envelopes for a ‘mind reading’ trick, and the rest of the cast quickly learns to not lend her any money for bill cuts. When it comes to putting on a really wonderful magic show, Shiny Chariot she ain’t.

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A Calm Little Slice of Magic – Flying Witch “Spoiler” Review

Let me get the spoiler out of the way first: there is nothing that happens in this show that could really be considered a spoiler.

Flying Witch is, in a way, Slice of Life in its purest genre form. There isn’t really a plot, or a sense of progress, or even much of an overarching theme the way some shows that get tagged ‘Slice of Life’ have some other genre. And when it comes to storytelling genres, rather than world genres (of which “urban fantasy” applies here), I don’t think any others really apply to Flying Witch. I’ve heard this sort of Slice of Life referred to as ‘Slice of Nothing’ and I think that’s accurate, with a couple of caveats. First of all, it’s not a strict and absolute nothing. The characters, at least, do grow over the episodes, and that’s fine. Second, it should be stressed that even if the term sounds somewhat negative, there’s really nothing wrong with it.

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