An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Zero to Hero(ine) – Ga-Rei-Zero Spoiler Review

You know it, you love to see it: a world where it’s the modern day except secret ghosts and ghouls menace reality and are fought off by equally secret heroes. It’s the urban fantasy masquerade action classic formula. It’s Ga-Rei-Zero.

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In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there are Little Girls – Black Bullet Spoiler Review

Well, if an idea isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Instead, remix it! Here we have a very classic and functional idea, a world where humanity is on the brink of ruin because of some unforeseeable mythical disaster or alien invasion. We also have the scenario where little girls are the badass fighters of the hour, beholden to their adult handlers, which seems to be my theme for the time being.

But again, when something works, it works. There’s no reason these elements shouldn’t go together like peanut butter and jelly, with supernatural powers to excuse the fighting girls and gribbly enemies to provide fearsome foes. It still takes care and skill to execute that sort of vision, but going in from frame 1 it’s certainly possible.

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Once More With Schoolgirl Assassins – Lycoris Recoil Spoiler Review

Almost two whole decades after the original Gunslinger Girl, along came a show that took the anime-viewing world by storm with basically the same pitch: In the ambiguously near future, a world government secretly maintains order in society by using specially trained minor girls to do their wetwork.

It’s hard to talk about Lycoris Recoil without addressing the kind of hype this show had. Frankly, around the peak of its popularity, it was the kind of reception that no actual show is going to quite live up to, not even an extremely good one. How far short of that unreachable mark such a show falls… is another story entirely.

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Seasonal Selection – Metallic Rouge Episode 1

Our story takes place in the grungy, noir-ish cityscape of Mars, where humans and robotic persons live side-by-side in a setting that simultaneously evokes 1920 and something more like what we’d imagine of 2420. If that doesn’t immediately catch your interest, you might not be the audience for this kind of Scifi.

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Back, in Action – Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino Spoiler Review

Il Teatrino is the sequel to last week’s review, Gunslinger Girl. Produced after five years, it has some significant discontinuity from the “first season” and thus today I’m giving Il Teatrino it’s own review. Does it hold up to the high bar set by its predecessor? Let’s take a look.

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Slice of Death – Gunslinger Girl Spoiler Review

Gunslinger girl is a unique show. The pitch is this: in the ambiguous near future, the government of Italy Social Welfare Agency is a front that picks up little girls who are unwanted and/or damaged beyond conventional recall and gives them (brief, probably) new lives as unassuming cyborg assassins, trained and conditioned to fight alongside their handlers and kill as the government demands in bands known as Fratello.

But while that sounds like a high action, high drama, probably angsty sort of affair what we get instead is a slow-burn methodical character study of these damaged girls and the men who care for them, only occasionally punctuated by bouts of violence. It has more in common with Haibane Renmei than it does with your average action show. Then again, if you know how I regard Haibane Renmei, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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Eighteen Years, and Dead No Longer – Erased Spoiler Review

Hm… unless I miss my mark, there’s some kind of festival going on right now. Usually, I give everyone a present by cracking into some of the worst stuff (or at least the stuff that ticks me off) and digging into it, but this year, I think I’ll give people looking for good anime to watch a present and review Erased.

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