An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

School Shooting – Upotte!! Spoiler Review

Years before Girls’ Frontline, there was another anime that presented cute girls who were also, somehow, famed military combat rifles. While Moe Anthropomorphizations are common enough, there’s always that little hurdle of getting used to them, especially when it’s not just in the background but rather direct about the concept.

Enter Upotte!! (the title is very excited), that aforementioned show about guns who are also cute girls doing cute things (while going to school and learning how to gun better). At a mere 10 episodes there is, for better or worse, not that much to get through, and it’s hard to imagine it being less effective than GFL was, so let’s go ahead and dig in.

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Immortal Genre – Kemono Jihen Spoiler Review

The world has been saturated with Isekai for so long that it’s hard to remember sometimes that there are other genres that are or were nearly as overused. Some are up and coming like the Modern Dungeon setting with Video Game powers, which has had one of its core pillars adapted fairly recently. Others are old, and kind of fallen out of favor. I have a weird affection for the Battle School sort of genre even if they had a lot of copy-paste, but the Masquerade Supernatural Battler is also up there for action setups that have been around the block a few times. I’ve reviewed no few of them over the life of this blog, and Kemono Jihen… is another?

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Character Bonding – H2O: Footprints in the Sand Spoiler Review

Welcome to Visual Novel land, where everything’s made up and only the cute girls matter! There’s certainly a style to the more typical or classical VN adaptations, the ones that follow relatively mundane Gal Game sorts of affairs rather than the merciless mecha nightmare of Muv Luv Alternative or the Lovecraftian WTF soup that was Demonbane… and that is 100% on display here in H2O.

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Turning Over the Right Leaf – Kemurikusa Spoiler Review

Rarely have I seen a story that just decides to throw the viewer into a such a bonkers scenario without building any real investment or reason to care as Kemurikusa does in its first episode. Does that proclamation sound sudden, like it’s missing the preamble I would usually include in one of these reviews? Good! Because that means it represents the show’s opening fairly well.

So, let’s get the first episode out. We open with two redhead girls who identify as sisters and seem to have supernatural powers getting excited over the discovery of a pool of water on “the island”. They need to report back so “the roots” can gather it, and in the mean time are worried about “red bugs”. Sure enough one of those appears, the very mechanical-seeming black-with-crimson-lights insect like giant monster that one of the girls has to fight while telling the other to run back to base. The girl told to run, though, evidently didn’t and instead went for the water site again, encountering another red bug along the way.

The fighter girl (having conversed with the other sister, who has catgirl ears and mannerisms and manipulates glowing green filaments that are presumably “roots”) finds the little sister dying, having performed some kind of mutual kill with the bug. She dissolves into pink wireframe leaves as the other girl we’ve known for maybe five minutes grieves and the audience wonders how much we should really care about this mess. 

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Because it sounds cooler that way – Beyond the Boundary Spoiler Review

In a world where we have a truly absurd number of Urban Fantasy supernatural battle shows, indulging in a world under Masquerade where inhuman threats exist just out of sight for normals, Beyond the Boundary is… one of them.

Specifically, Beyond the Boundary is concerned with Spirit World Warriors and the Yomu they hunt. Its main characters are Akihito, an immortal half-Yomu under the protection of a clan of such warriors and Mirai, his shy kouhai who happens to also be a Spirit World Warrior, in her case descended from a cursed clan with their own seemingly dark power.

Oddly enough, we spend a lot of time in this show just dealing with the daily lives of these characters, all of whom other than Mirai (who still has her moments) are either deadpan snarkers, pervy loons, or both.

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Start Your Engines – Wish Upon the Pleiades Spoiler Review

Some series exist to push product. It’s true in Western animation and it’s true in Anime as well. Usually, the product in question is some manner of toy; I’ve covered a fair number of anime shows based on card games or plastic models, so this blog is no stranger to the sometimes desperate product tie-in side of the art form.

Yet even given that, Wish Upon the Pleiades is weird. Subaru – the car company – apparently decided that they needed an anime outing to their name, and got Gainax of all studios to put it together for them, first as an ONA in 2011 and then as a full-run show in 2015. The latter is what we’re looking at today.

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Second Quest, First Anime — Blue Reflection Ray Spoiler Review

Let’s talk about feelings.

But not any specific feelings. Feelings in abstract. The idea of feelings. Let’s ride the fine line between deeply exploratory science fiction and outright Care Bears as we treat feelings, categorically, as well-defined things and not aspects of mood, situation, personality, or so on.

And let’s make this talk at least somewhat interesting by having magical girls battle over the outcome. Let’s talk about Blue Reflection Ray.

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What. – Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror Spoiler Review

Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is a show about a girl called Yohane, who is trying to make it big as a pop idol when… let me start over. Yohane the Parhelion is a show about a girl called Yohane trying to fit in in her small town home, alongside her giant talking wolf… let me start over. Yohane is a show about a fantastical world with mythical beings, talking animals… one talking animal… magic music and… hold on, I think I need to start over again. This is a show about the bonds between a group of special young women and how they can hope to dispel a dark magical calamity threatening their town, and… You know what, I’ll try the simple version.

Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is a show. Let’s talk about it.

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(Inter)Planetary Romance – Waiting in the Summer Spoiler Review

Sometimes creators come back to an idea after some time has passed. Whether the world has seen the “old version” or not and however the two stack up to each other in terms of quality, it’s pretty inevitable. After all, most creators tend to create things they would like, and if what you like doesn’t change a whole lot, it’s inevitable that you’d return to certain concepts.

I mention this because Waiting in the Summer is the spiritual successor with a very similar pitch and from the same creator to a property called Onegai☆Teacher. If that sounds somewhat familiar to long-time readers it’s probably because I reviewed the semi-sequel to it, Onegai☆Twins some time ago. While Twins had its own independent story, it did of course have some inheritance from Teacher, so while I haven’t to date taken the time to view Onegai☆Teacher, I am at least somewhat aware of its facts: Alien comes to earth, bumps into boy, and through some more-or-less contrived coincidences ends up both his teacher and his fiancee.

Twins largely dropped the space alien angle, other than with its mascot critter’s presence, while keeping the same setting. Waiting in the Summer, meanwhile, is a new property with a new setting and no in-lore connection to the Onegai series. However, it features a very similar pitch: Alien comes to earth, bumps into boy, is a cute girl who’s really bad at disguising the fact she’s a space alien, romantic comedy ensues.

Viewing this, as is necessary for me, as its own thing and not in light of Onegai☆Teacher, how does Waiting in the Summer do?

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