An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

How to Not Make a Sequel – Shakugan no Shana Second Spoiler Review

Sequels are simultaneously some of the easiest and hardest things to write. On one hand, it’s hard to live up to ‘the original’ in a lot of ways. People will look at the new sequel and automatically compare it to what came before, so there’s a higher than average bar set for the sequel. On the other hand, a lot of the legwork you’d normally have to do is already done, and if you’re continuing on with a story the first one was clearly good enough that you have a strong backbone to build off of. Sometimes you can even make an acceptable if not good sequel by just doing more of the same (particularly if you have an episodic premise that can be arbitrarily extended… much like Shana, in theory). It’s usually better to innovate and expand, but some properties can just get away with giving us more of what we liked to begin with.

Shakugan no Shana Second… does not do that. And it suffers for it as a sequel. It falls into that firsthand trap where, aside from its own merits, it just doesn’t hit the same high notes its predecessor did, and presents to us a degraded product, lesser in just about every way. How much lesser? Let’s take a look.

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How To Urban Fantasy – Shakugan no Shana (Season 1) Spoiler Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a world of magic and monsters exists alongside our every-day world, but most people are unaware of it. The Magic World is full of both dangers and wonders. One day, our main character, an average person, is introduced to the supernatural truth that was hidden from them, encounters a magical figure who will act as a mentor and/or guide to the new world, and ends up getting embroiled in life and death affairs to which others are ignorant. Often, the main character will quickly or slowly come into some special power of their own that makes them highly significant in the magical world when they were a nobody in the human world.

If you wanted to stop me at any point in that, you might have encountered Urban Fantasy at some point.

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On Wax Wings – Guilty Crown Spoiler Review

So, this is a bit of a weird one – I’ve already done a whole Audio Commentary series on Guilty Crown, what more could I possibly have to say?

Well, really, what I want to do is break down Guilty Crown in a more controlled manner, having the ability now to look back on the whole thing. Perspective is a big deal, and with it I’ve found that my opinion is somewhat different than it was in the middle. In addition to that, not everybody wants to sit through an Audio Commentary, and unlike Hundred I think Guilty Crown is worth a closer look.

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It’s Some Wonderful Madness – The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Spoiler Review

You know, I’ve never enjoyed watching It’s A Wonderful Life. Not that it’s a bad film – far from it! It’s amazingly well acted, with brilliant cinematography and everything else people say about it. If anything, its problem might be that in a sense it’s too good. I end up feeling so much of the pain and misery through the middle of the film that even though I totally recognize its quality, I don’t have a good time with it. It just isn’t that kind of film for me.

Most of its imitators, though, are hard to watch for the usual reasons. The original, despite my personal aversion to viewing it again, had a subtle touch and a lot of skill behind it. As is often (but not always) true of great works, attempting to imitate what a master was able to do without being a master is a recipe for disaster. So, you can imagine my trepidation when I learned that the cinematic followup to the Haruhi Suzumiya series was supposed to be cut from the cloth of It’s a Wonderful Life. That film’s what we’re looking at today – I know I usually do a series for Monday, but it’s Christmas week, you’ll excuse me a little diversion from the usual in order to stay on theme.

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Trying Hard and Falling Flat – AnoHana Spoiler Review

So, before launching into the review, it’s worth noting that the site has been updated. The “About” page now contains actual content, there’s a brand new “Novels” page for advertising my current and future novels, an “Index” page that collects reviewed shows by letter grade, and a “Contact” page ready for all the hate mail folks will probably want to send me because it’s time to look into AnoHana and I’m going to come out and say… I didn’t care for it.

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First Impressions Can Be Deceiving – Girl in Twilight Spoiler Review

So, Girl in Twilight is a confusing little show that’s difficult to summarize, in part because it clearly wants to be a little bit of everything. It’s a bizarre dive into even stranger scenarios – half the time you’ll be questioning why we, as the audience, are going along with any of this… but the other half the time you won’t care because the show is good at taking something insane and making you believe if not the scenario than at least the emotions.

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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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