An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

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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