An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

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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Seasonal Selection – Kamitsubaki City Under Construction Episodes 0 & 1

I’ll be totally honest right here at the start – I’ve never watched a Vtuber yet. I don’t have any real antipathy towards the idea but to date that hasn’t really been part of my media sphere, following such personalities and their exploits. I’ve heard a little music and been introduced to some of their visual designs, and that’s about it.

I mention this because Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is supposed to be part of a bigger vtuber-driven or at least vtuber-centered multimedia project including original songs, a visual novel game, and of course this anime outing. But I’m coming into this show from the perspective of, essentially, a new viewer. Total sight unseen. And for the duration of this seasonal, I’ll avoid changing that even if I want to, so I can continue to assess each episode from the same anime-only perspective rather than suddenly jumping some week to “it’s no longer a blind run”

From the “first two” episodes (Episode 0 and the proper Episode 1, though I don’t know why they were cut that way), I can say at least it has my attention.

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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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Cute Girls Not Doing Mecha Things – Alice Gear Aegis Expansion Spoiler Review

Alas, poor Mecha Musume. Why must such a fun aesthetic seemingly always lead back to troubled outings? It’s a question both seemingly without answer and tragic in the asking. Cute girls and heavy weaponry seem like they should be a winning combination. I mean, it works when the girls are operating the weapons as in High School Fleet or to a lesser extent Girls Und Panzer, and even when they equip some serious gear in the context of a magical girl outing with a somewhat techist look and/or feel like Yuki Yuna is a Hero or especially Vividred Operation. So there shouldn’t be anything really in the way of getting a proper Mecha Musume outing.

But Busou Shinki happened. It squandered its designs on a living toys angle, and it wasn’t good. Then we get Frame Arms Girl which does the exact same thing as Busou Shinki only… less. Finally there came LBX Girl, which went with actual mecha powers in a good ol’ alien invasion bug war… and it sucked, giving us very few action set pieces and a lame plot dominated by food tourism rather than using said actual mecha powers. And a little bit after that hot mess, we got Alice Gear Aegis Expansion.

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