An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

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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Love, Murder, and Godhood – Mirai Nikki Spoiler Review (plus Redial)

This is it, the show that revels in everything dark and twisted. From its very premise, Mirai Nikki promises death, mayhem, and bloodshed and boy does it ever deliver. This may not be literally the bloodiest show I’ve ever seen, nor the one with the highest body count of characters with speaking roles (though it’s at least a solid competitor on both scores), but it absolutely and without reservation leverages its gore and brutality to create a cohesive and uncompromising image of itself and its world.

Normally, I don’t tend to gravitate towards shows that are this brutal, but that’s not so much out of having a problem with dark stuff as it is having a problem with darkness for the sake of darkness, which is a trap far too many media products fall into. You can go as miserable as you want, as long as there’s some sort of reason for it… and Mirai Nikki, at least, has plenty of reason.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 7

Welcome back Azur Lane. We missed you. The week of break seems to have done a world of good in terms of getting the animation quality under control, getting us a big action-heavy episode with few if any of the derpy zoom-out shots and, as if to try to balance out episode 6, basically no extra fanservice slipped in. The result is an episode that feels a little story-light but that does properly represent a turning point and a solid beginning for the second half of the show.

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How is Something so Goofy so Deep and Complex? – Planet With Spoiler Review

What kind of media do you think kids should be exposed to?

It’s a complicated question, with a lot of factors to consider. How old a kid are we talking about? Do they have any pre-existing interests? Is it a boy or a girl? Does that even matter? And even answering those questions, I don’t think you’re going to find a consensus of any sort and far be it from me to supply one.

I do, of course, have an opinion on the matter, as I must consider about this time of year when I have younger family members. I find that I’m of the camp where I feel that younger consumers of media can take, or possibly even need, material that has a creative intelligence and serious approach to its subject matter and the world even if that means going dark places or risking some emotional confusion. I kind of think about things like The Last Unicorn, The Neverending Story, Don Bluth films from before the 1990s like The Land Before Time or Secret of NIMH, most if not all of Miyazaki’s filmography… and I think Planet With belongs on the list somewhere.

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