An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

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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Anime Film Club: Living with Undeath – Summer Ghost Spoiler Review

Summer Ghost was a treat. Honestly, I’m shocked I didn’t talk about it before: I was fortunate enough to screen it at AX a few years back, and I knew from that I had to get the home video release. But I guess I wasn’t doing daily reports that year, because I’ve yet to mention it on the blog, meaning it stands as one of the big incentives for me doing this film club.

And I know, cat’s out of the bag, I thought it was good. At not even 40 minutes long, this is going to be a pretty quick review, so I might as well spoil what’s at the end of the spoilers, at least a little.

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Tits, Ass, Set, and Match – Harukana Recieve Spoiler Review

If there ever was a topic that begged to be used for fanservice, it’s beach volleyball – a sport famously played in bikinis to the possibly prurient enjoyment of viewers everywhere. Given how Cute Girls Sports Anime is basically its own genre it seems utterly natural that someone, eventually, would decide to make a show about beach volleyball. At least that sport actually exists. The show that emerges in response to that inevitably is Harukana Receive, with which we might as well try to have some fun in the sun.

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Anime Film Club: Field Trip to the Digital Land of OZ – Summer Wars Spoiler Review

Well, the weather is hot, the days are long, and most folks just want to do one thing about now: stay inside and play video games! Well, watching movies also tends to come up, so I guess it’s fitting that I’d tackle Summer Wars, a movie about the digital world.

Historically, I’ve been pretty sparse about reviewing movies (rather than series) on the blog, but this summer I’m going to set that aside for a little “film club”, working through a few specific titles with more typical fare between, and there didn’t seem a better place to start than this. True, of director Mamoru Hosoda’s filmography, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time would probably be the first on many folks’ lists, but Summer Wars fits the season and is nearly as well regarded.

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Mirai Bakka – Platinum End Spoiler Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a dozen individuals are placed in a battle royale, with godhood as the prize…

And presumably you’ve stopped me by now, because that’s Mirai Nikki. It’s one of the best-known anime series ever made, and while it’s not exactly as acclaimed as it is watched, neither am I an outlier for considering it to be… pretty good. Yeah, I’ve reviewed Mirai Nikki already. Which is why it’s positively strange that I find myself here, reviewing Mirai Nikki, now apparently calling itself Platinum End in a vain attempt to disguise that it is, in fact, Mirai Nikki.

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Yes, You Are Projecting – Planetarian Spoiler Review

So, this is not my typical fare. Planetarian (also known as Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet) is a short anime, consisting of just five episodes, on average a little short of 20 minutes. It’s more the size of a movie which, while I do hope to take on more in the future, is not what I typically review. Still, some variety once in a while is fine.

Planetarian is also a title that tends to come up if you delve into robot stories in anime, one of a few that I haven’t covered that’s consistently referenced in discussions of others I have perhaps addressed. I’ll avoid naming other names right now but suffice to say, for such a little thing, it seems to have left a big impact on a certain crowd.

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