An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Dive into Darkness – Kissdum R Engage Planet Spoiler Review

From April to September 2007, there ran an anime-original action show aiming more or less for the shonen demographic, focused on plucky fighters on a ruined Earth. The punchline is that this time I’m talking about Kissdum R Engage Planet (Sometimes styled Kiss Dum Engage Planet), not Gurren Lagann.

And right out the gate, I am not expecting this to be on par with Gurren Lagann. Few shows are. I could always be pleasantly surprised, but it’s not to be anticipated nor required for passing or even good marks. It’s interesting that they ran during the same seasons, but only as a little bit of trivia. And speaking of trivia, I have it on good authority that there are some Lovecraftian references and styles in this one, so let’s take a look.

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Creepy Clay – H.P. Lovecraft no Dunwich Horror Sonota no Monogatari Spoiler Review

Well, let’s kick off a month of celebrating Lovecraftian themes in anime with an oddity: so far as I could find, the only “anime” direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s own stories.

I put “anime” in scare quotes, as while this is a Toei production and thus certainly part of the output of the anime industry, it’s not exactly your traditional fare, being done primarily through claymation. It’s also a fairly short OVA, covering three Lovecraft stories in about 45 minutes.

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Ninja Pirate Saint Treasure Hunter Submarine Extravaganza – Fena: Pirate Princess Spoiler Review

Fena is a shocking existence – a 2021 original featuring two of the things that much older memes loved best, pirates and ninjas! It’s a show that promises some swashbuckling and/or sneaky adventures, in that nostalgic fantasy band where the journey matters and the history is tenuous at best. It is a material that, from its pitch, is practically begging to be made cheesy fun, but without any sort of ceiling preventing it from rising above that.

Heck with long intros, let’s watch it!

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Space 2075 – Planetes Spoiler Review

Kessler Syndrome is not a new idea. It was theorized a long time ago – a situation where debris and space junk in Low Earth Orbit reaches a density where an impact can cause a chain reaction of chaotic incidents, making space travel drastically more dangerous and taking out satellites en masse.

It sounds like one of those absurd sci-fi ideas: space is big, so filling it up to the point where an entire orbital area goes into billiards from hell doesn’t seem reasonable. But space is also very fast, meaning that because individual pieces of debris can cover a lot of “ground”, the scenario is more likely than you might think.

But what to do about it? Well, in addition to trying to dispose of our junk responsibly by boosting it into decaying orbits and letting it burn up in the atmosphere, we could plan operations specifically to, you know, clean up after ourselves. This is where Planetes comes in.

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Murderous Art – Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace Spoiler Review

Ranpo Edogawa was a Japanese author, primarily active in the Showa era (though debuting a couple years before its proper start), who was somewhat instrumental in taking his inspirations like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe and synthesizing from that a brand of mystery and thriller fiction that was, instead of being purely imitative, a uniquely Japanese take on the genres, particularly Detective fiction.

What does that have to do with Rampo Kitan? Well, the show would like you to believe that, being made in honor of the 50th anniversary of his passing, it is inspired by his work. But all accounts suggest the word “inspired” here is used very loosely, resulting in an odd detective thriller for which this trivia is a minor footnote.

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Do you like books? – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san Spoiler (?) Review

Well, it’s September, and despite the relentless incursion of academic schedules into the infernally hot summer days, this is still when I choose to do some “back to school” content. This year, I’m keeping it short and sweet; those still in education are likely buying their textbooks right now (a topic that fills me with memories of bitter annoyance at certain price tags and the joy of discovery since I took a lot of lit classes) so I’m reviewing an anime about a book shop. It’s tangential at best but I’ve got enough theme months in my schedule, so I’m reclaiming September. Take it or leave it.

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Anime Film Club – Spoiler Review

What can I say to introduce <harmony/> that I haven’t said about a show in the past? I waxed long about dystopian fiction and the reactionary fear of the science fiction genre introducing Love and Lies, and while I could reword my lengthy digression, that would seem a little cheap.

For those who don’t want to follow the link and read the whole long thing, I’ll give the super-basic summary: dystopian fiction is pretty common, and arguably for good reason because conflict makes good stories and thus utopias aren’t much fun. But it’s still, philosophically, a frustration with lots of entries in the Science Fiction genre. <harmony/> is arguably another.

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Drifting Artists – Jellyfish Can’t Swim In The Night Spoiler Review

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is an oddly-titled tale of four girls trying to make it as… not a band exactly, but a musical/creative sort of group.  the biggest issue, of course, is that all these girls have massive issues that need to be worked through if they’re ever to be happy or successful.  It’s a tried and true formula, but there’s no reason to hold that against this fairly recent outing.

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A Song of Wind and Not Much Else – The Pilot’s Love Song Spoiler Review

Aeronautical worlds, while hardly unknown in fantasy, often feel kind of fresh and magical. Maybe it’s just easy to make the sky – and mysteries in it – seem magical, especially in visual media that can give you vast sweeping shots of cloudscapes or a good sense of motion. Miyazaki’s love of flying scenes is well known (with Castle in the Sky being perhaps a template for the aerial fantasy), but you get other properties that dive into it like Granblue Fantasy, Skies of Arcadia, Last Exile, or this week’s topic, The Pilot’s Love Song.

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