An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

It’s Some Wonderful Madness – The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Spoiler Review

You know, I’ve never enjoyed watching It’s A Wonderful Life. Not that it’s a bad film – far from it! It’s amazingly well acted, with brilliant cinematography and everything else people say about it. If anything, its problem might be that in a sense it’s too good. I end up feeling so much of the pain and misery through the middle of the film that even though I totally recognize its quality, I don’t have a good time with it. It just isn’t that kind of film for me.

Most of its imitators, though, are hard to watch for the usual reasons. The original, despite my personal aversion to viewing it again, had a subtle touch and a lot of skill behind it. As is often (but not always) true of great works, attempting to imitate what a master was able to do without being a master is a recipe for disaster. So, you can imagine my trepidation when I learned that the cinematic followup to the Haruhi Suzumiya series was supposed to be cut from the cloth of It’s a Wonderful Life. That film’s what we’re looking at today – I know I usually do a series for Monday, but it’s Christmas week, you’ll excuse me a little diversion from the usual in order to stay on theme.

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Trying Hard and Falling Flat – AnoHana Spoiler Review

So, before launching into the review, it’s worth noting that the site has been updated. The “About” page now contains actual content, there’s a brand new “Novels” page for advertising my current and future novels, an “Index” page that collects reviewed shows by letter grade, and a “Contact” page ready for all the hate mail folks will probably want to send me because it’s time to look into AnoHana and I’m going to come out and say… I didn’t care for it.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 10

What a way to enter a hiatus.

Because, yeah, in case you hadn’t heard, Episodes 11 and 12 of Azur Lane will be delayed… to March. The reasons given for doing this seem to tie back to the animation quality. While I’ve been more interested in the plot and story structure, I have alluded to the state of the animation and… you know, I’ve seen worse telling better stories, but I can’t say I don’t understand having a desire to submit better work. When we get the remastered rerun (assuming the full run gets touched up), I’ll be watching it, but I won’t rerun an episode-by-episode look through. If there are substantive changes, rather than it just looking better, I’ll cover them in an article before Episode 11. Otherwise, this series will just enter hibernation and return when Episode 11 actually debuts.

That out of the way, let’s talk about our last episode for a while.

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First Impressions Can Be Deceiving – Girl in Twilight Spoiler Review

So, Girl in Twilight is a confusing little show that’s difficult to summarize, in part because it clearly wants to be a little bit of everything. It’s a bizarre dive into even stranger scenarios – half the time you’ll be questioning why we, as the audience, are going along with any of this… but the other half the time you won’t care because the show is good at taking something insane and making you believe if not the scenario than at least the emotions.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 9

And here we get the breather episode before what will presumably be the climactic set, It’s possible we might not launch right back into action; at the least, the common pacing of AL episodes would dictate we have the first half of an episode to talk things over before getting into more action. All the same, there was a lot that needed setting up, so we’ll go through how the show handled those topics.

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Guilty Crown Audio Commentary – Part 4/5

Did everybody have a good Thanksgiving? The Guilty Crown Audio Commentary is back after a 1-week break for Turkey-eating purposes, and with back episodes! This time we get kind of a before and after of what felt like it should have been the show’s climax.

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Cute Ghost Girl and the Lazy Formula – Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs Spoiler Review

To start off, a word of what we’re getting into: this show is probably something like 90% Ecchi Harem Comedy and 10% Light Action. There’s not a ton of meat to the product, and what there is has a lot of standard notes. So, in some ways, rather than looking at this as a review of an individual show, I want to examine the formula. What works, why it works, and what we should jolly well expect better from instead. This is still going to be primarily an analysis of the show at hand, but it’s standard enough that I want to keep an eye open for what’s done the same everywhere and why.

It’s also worth a note that I prefer to get my Anime through legal streaming means. There are a lot of them, but this ranks a notice here because the one I knew to use for Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs happened to be Crunchyroll and the version there is censored – there are a lot of scenes where a good amount of screen is taken up by extra thick steam or magical beams of heavenly light. And for the purposes of reviewing a show, I think that’s perfectly fine. While nudity can be used in an effective manner for storytelling and atmosphere (and was in shows I’ve previously reviewed, like Mirai Nikki), I’m personally of the opinion that if a show can’t survive without drawings of nipples, well, then it was dead on arrival.

Those programming notes out of the way, let’s talk about Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 8

Enterprise is having a bad day.

I mean, everyone’s kind of having a bad day today, what with being caught in a sea full of crumbling ice mountains and ever more shattered-window holes in the sky just sort of leaking reality out into an infinite star field, but Enterprise’s day in particular seems kind of terrible especially since she’s spending a good deal of it not really being herself. I guess Kaga might have her beat, depending on how you look at it…

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