An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

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.

Read More…Read More…

Summoning Rituals Make Poor(?) Matchmakers – Familiar of Zero Spoiler Review

Familiar of Zero is an action-comedy about a teenage boy, Saito, who is summoned as the familiar of a young mage girl from another world, Louise.

Louise is voiced by Rie Kugimiya. If you don’t know who that is, that’s fine; I myself am not usually one to follow actors or voice actors; I’d rather see/hear the character. She is, however, very prolific and very talented. I first heard her work (though I didn’t know there was any significance to it at the time) as Alphonse Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, but she is perhaps best known for her Tsundere voice roles. And more than that, her short, flat-chested, loud-mouthed Tsunderes with firecracker tempers. Louise is exactly one of those roles. That is, in fact, how and why I found this show. I liked Shana (Shakugan no Shana) and Taiga Aisaka (Toradora!) and was in the mood for another enjoyable character in the same vein.

What I got was Familiar of Zero. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.

Read More…Read More…

Surveying the Damage One Character can do to a Show – Kaze no Stigma Spoiler Review

Kaze no Stigma is a show that started out with a lot of potential, but squandered it by making some very basic mistakes. The setup involves a society of magic users that exist secretly in what is essentially our regular mundane world – the backbone of at least a sizeable subset of the broad genre of “Urban Fantasy” that combines magic and monsters with the trappings of the mundane world. Good so far. Our main character is Kazuma, the scion of a house of fire magic wielders who was kicked out of his family because he was, himself, incapable… and who returns with a new mastery of a different element, Air. That’s a pretty good setup for a character. The show puts him in a position to help his former family in their time of need, but of course he should have some conflicted opinions about that, considering that he was bitterly mistreated. A good treatment would let us learn more about the character through his struggles, understanding what happened to him in the interval to lead him to this new power and how his trials shaped him and will continue to shape him going forward.

Kaze no Stigma… does not deliver a good treatment of this material. There’s more to worry about outside of Kazuma, but I’m going start with him because his problems are the most numerous and varied and his waste of potential the most striking.

Read More…Read More…

The Many-Worlds Interpretation Makes for Surprising Drama – Noein Spoiler Review

Quantum physics comes up surprisingly often in media. Perhaps it’s because it’s on the arcane end of current science, and thus it’s fairly easy to use it as a line of plausible BS to cover for whatever the writer wants to happen.

Noein may have its fair share of ‘might as well be magic’, but I felt like it took it a more serious look at what its ‘quantum’ arcana would actually imply, and ran with the storytelling possibilities of applying quantum realities on the scale of human events.

You Got Your Exploration of AI and Humanity in My Shipgirl Action Show! Arpeggio of Blue Steel Spoiler Review

A lot of shows try to be more than one thing. It makes sense, letting them find appeal on some tracks even if others fall through. And all too often, reaching for more than was necessary causes the work to fail on all marks. Similarly, you sometimes get shows that aren’t smart, but want you to think they are, resulting in a pretentious mess that didn’t need to be one and could have worked if it embraced a simple core. These are pretty common results.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is exactly the opposite of that.