An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Psychics, Robots, and Ninjas, oh my! – Blackfox Spoiler Review

Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing. The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard the basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge. Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s very much real. The question is, is it any good?

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For My Next Trick, The Inverting Frown! – Magical Sempai Spoiler Review

Magical Sempai (and that is the romanization they go with. I’ll try to stick to it.) is a mildly ecchi comedy about high school students populating a club dedicated to stage magic. The show mostly follows the point of view of Assistant (he doesn’t get a name) as he deals with Sempai (she doesn’t get a name either) and her attempts to put on various magic tricks despite her many failings. These failures are always embarrassing in some manner, often involve a self-inflicted wardrobe malfunction, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t at least a little bit funny some of the time.

The center of pretty much all the show’s comedy is Sempai. She’s the only member of the Magic Club at the start of the show and… they say she has crippling stage fright, but it’s more often treated just like she has crippling incompetence since she has no problems getting up in front of audiences, whether just Assistant or actual crowds, to fail time and time again. Whatever the cause, the effect is that Sempai screws up every trick she attempts, usually in an overwhelmingly pathetic manner. For instance, she can attempt a rope escape only to end up more securely hog tied than she started out, throw the coin she wants to make disappear (at which point she falls over herself trying to get it back), forget her marked envelopes for a ‘mind reading’ trick, and the rest of the cast quickly learns to not lend her any money for bill cuts. When it comes to putting on a really wonderful magic show, Shiny Chariot she ain’t.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 2

At some point, I have to question what I’m expecting out of Azur Lane. To an extent, this is a question for any show, as you attempt to determine what the ambition of the creators was. It would be pure madness to try to hold everything to the same standards. For Azur Lane, I think the evidence is mounting that there is at least some real desire to tell a war story, even surrounded as it is by a lot of fanservice of every kind.

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A Calm Little Slice of Magic – Flying Witch “Spoiler” Review

Let me get the spoiler out of the way first: there is nothing that happens in this show that could really be considered a spoiler.

Flying Witch is, in a way, Slice of Life in its purest genre form. There isn’t really a plot, or a sense of progress, or even much of an overarching theme the way some shows that get tagged ‘Slice of Life’ have some other genre. And when it comes to storytelling genres, rather than world genres (of which “urban fantasy” applies here), I don’t think any others really apply to Flying Witch. I’ve heard this sort of Slice of Life referred to as ‘Slice of Nothing’ and I think that’s accurate, with a couple of caveats. First of all, it’s not a strict and absolute nothing. The characters, at least, do grow over the episodes, and that’s fine. Second, it should be stressed that even if the term sounds somewhat negative, there’s really nothing wrong with it.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 1

After some worry about who if anyone would be streaming this thing, it’s finally here, the Azur Lane anime, and I’m going to be taking a look at each of the episodes as they come out, either Thursday evenings or Friday until the show is done. This week, we get a war started and find out what the anime is going to feel like.

Before really diving in, I feel I should link my pre-anime lore roundup. You can find it here: https://harperanimereviews.com/how-much-lore-does-it-take-to-justify-cute-ship-girls-a-prelude-to-azur-lane/

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Hundred Audio Commentary, Part 1

Back when I was just rating and reviewing shows on MAL, Hundred was the show that got the lowest marks from me. That wasn’t to say it was the show that I disliked the most or even that it was the show that did the most wrong. Rather, it earned that dubious distinction because, at the time I viewed it, I felt that it was the show that tried the least and achieved the least. Anything I liked less had more effort and ambition, at least.

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Titles I can’t make up – Battle Divas: The Incorruptible Battle Blossom Princess (Light Novel Review)

I implore anyone who wants a good takeaway from this review to read it the whole way through.

Battle Divas is one of the more… unique experiences in literature I’ve had lately. Which isn’t to say its plot and characters are unique. Far from it – if you’re a fan of anime, you’ve seen the broad strokes of this story before about a million times, including the broad strokes of the characters: the mild-mannered and usually ineffectual male lead who’s actually amazingly badass, the spitfire love interest who won’t admit she more than hates said lead, the cool love interest who won’t emote if her life depends on it, the slightly less popular aggressively pervy love interest; these are all familiar. Similarly familiar are the trappings of demon kings, chanted-up magic, evil empires, battles being decided on the force of singular champions with kickass powers, super-powered cat fights breaking out at the drop of a hat and causing massive property damage, innocent situations that look compromising found at the exact wrong moment by people who don’t feel like listening to explanations, and so on.

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