Fun.
Character banter was fun and it was visually solid in its art quality and character designs. Bocchi was an enjoyable protagonist. The moments where other guitarists recognised she was about to switch on and start shredding were cool. I don’t see it being a modern anime phenomenon, but debatably that’s a failing of me having watched it in a single day. For the seasonal watchers its humour was probably something which compounded across each week. But regardless as is I’m left wondering if its acclaim is a result of a fandom genuinely resonating with its storyline or if it’s just the she’s literally me meme holding it up like Oregairu.
A dense metaphoric commentary on birth, death, and the potential contained within the lifetime that occupies the space between these two moments. Well either that or, like, aliens.
A super fascinating, super ambitious show that knows its style and structure well. It’s made to appeal to a very specific audience niche and when you’re in that niche it hits. It’s hard to decide which cour is better. The Last Song tightens the timeframe a great deal and focuses more on character exploration, but I also love the larger scope of the timeline in S1. I again iterate how ConRevo really, truly is not an anime for everyone. The storytelling is fast-paced, overloaded with setting and character information, and just all around deliberately confusing. It targets a very specific audience through its abstract presentation and the heavy focus on tokusatsu & historical events. But when you’re in that niche man is it good. It was one of the first few seasonals I ever gave a 10 during its airing time (though the very first was Flip Flappers). The show’s stylings did a lot to directly codify my main anime preferences. “Confusing presentation, complex meanings and colourful personalities” is the line I’ve used before, and ConRevo is where I first really touched upon this.
Looking over the soundtrack again each episode, my favourites are still largely unchanged. Jiyuu ni Aruite Aishite (Kyoko ver.) for insert and Just a Human for bgm. But I did also come to greatly appreciate the Angel Stars version of that first one and Song of Departure from Raito’s shocking moment of insanity.As well, Let’s Go Past the Sky and Stars got some fantastic emotional usage throughout the show. Especially the bit-crushed parts that begin in the second half of the song.
Score reflects the original Di Gi Charat & its accompaniments. The alternative TV series will all come to be rated separately. Considering how much pop culture prevalence it carries (is everything in the vein of Poemii, Dokuro-chan, Magical Pokaan & Teekyuu actually emulating this??), it is unsurprising to discover that Di Gi Charat is genuinely just good culture. Very strong comedic trio, and the constantly shifting lineart from its loose art style is enjoyable to watch. In addition that zany humour, I feel, is heightened by the cozy setting. In real life I despise cities, but their representations in retro anime always have such a comfy aesthetic to them from the pastel colouration unique to cels of the era and the amount of white space in frame. This is the sort of anime which really makes you miss cels.
The wacky, colourful set design was cool, but otherwise speaking the show felt too much of a kids anime for me to find engaging. It’s weird seeing Dejiko and Puchiko not being complete assholes.
Piyoko is super fun. Not a character I’d have typecast Megumi Hayashibara for but she crushes it.
What in the transformative tarnation is this? It’s a fine character piece and interesting to see such a solemn, realistic take on the property, but hard to believe that such a thing could even exist. Dejiko usually goes nyo-nyo-nyo gimme snacks or i’ll blast ya, not LOVE and MELANCHOLY in a realistic setting?
Surprisingly interesting setting with the not-so-distant future tech. I appreciated the emotional framing of Serufu trying to reconnect with Purin, and the art direction is phenomenal.
I’ve been interested in watching this for years. Finally getting around to it is nice. I do like these older multi-season fantasy isekai such as this and Zero no Tsukaima quite a bit. Fantastic art and music (the guitar tracks especially reminded me of Atelier), a fun premise and cast. Pink hair ahoge is the ultimate in character design technologies and you cannot tell me otherwise. Though long silver hair Leo is also very cool. The main voice talents include Mamoru Miyano (who is the perfect cast for this flamboyant, airhead genki protagonist), Yui Horie, Ayana Taketatsu, Mizuki Nana and Ami Koshimizu. Side characters have Tange Sakura, Tetsuya Kakihara, HanaKana, Hikasa Yoko, Kana Asumi, Takehito Koyasu and Norio Wakamoto. All together, in the same show, at the same time, within just the first four episodes, then all continuing to be have real presence. So many expressive little touches to the series. Sometimes sakuga, sometimes mahou shoujo, sometimes a clothes-shredding ecchi action series, sometimes idol, sometimes JRPG homage - complete with chocobos, making the whole thing feel like the team were just having fun making it. Crazy stuff. Like, a real, actual, certified hidden gem.
Similarly charming. Falls into a bit more pervy harem routine to mask its slightly lessened production values, but this is ultimately not too much of a problem. It feels like the show really took notice of Yukki when reflecting on the first cour and now she’s promoted to main cast instead of a side character purely so that they can keep showing her off in these sleeveless yukatas.
Super impressed with the art qualities, character design, voice performance and laidback SoL comedy. The OP is a banger and the soundtrack has had some nice string pieces. And there is Kugimiyaaaaaaaa. Edomae Elf gets the Rie Kugimiya bonus, as all shows should aspire to really.
Cool to see the broader timeline of Near Third Impact + I appreciated the few shots recreating EoE at the start as the crosses swept across the world. It’s a short special but in that still displays an abundance of the Rebuild’s incredibly imagery.
Cool animation, interesting characters. At this point in Fate anime I do start to miss the humbler beginnings when not every battle was the equivalent of both sides magically nuking each other, but I suppose the choice to adapt this comes as a counterpart to the focus on Gilgamesh and Enkidu just recently in Babylonia, so it’ makes sense’s understandable.
The watching experience is cleanly split into moments without Fukuyama and moments with. The former are fun supernatural ecchi fare, the latter are legitimately hard to watch. This Lum-a-like uses fairly standard UY character dynamics, but made the particularly dangerous decision to roll Mendou and Ataru into one single character. No one being should have that much power. Fukuyama makes Ataru look like a saint. Genuinely kinda terrifying to watch the show cautious of who he’ll molest, manipulate or more next. The focus slowly drifts from over to Fukuyama as most episodic plots centre around him creating ecchi game scenarios while Yukinari is absent. Oftentimes it’s super grating and the antics just don’t really have the same charm as these events do in TLR or Yuuna-san. On the other hand he somehow forms a really wholesome dynamic with Tomoka and as a pair they sorta become the best part of the show. Hmm. Just a mixed bag Lum-a-like.
Any anime that climaxes with a Third Impact event is automatically a good anime. With how it started at Rodan and Jet Jaguar being fairly small, and a goofy cast that would feel right at home in the live action films, I definitely didn’t predict it going that direction. SP has Rie Kugimiya and Misaki Kuno voicing mascot characters together! Under any other circumstance that’d be the makings of an insane moe show. But here all of that works to establish the traditional Godzilla campiness as the show steadily climbs towards its calamity. Singular Point was an experimental take on the franchise perfectly emblematic of where modern Godzilla is, and where its strengths lie. Where the Showa series was stylistically homogenous, Heisei was a single storyline and the Millennium series was focused on updating the visual fidelity, the projects that have happened in the franchise’s current resurgence are all about dramatically, dynamically transforming the concept across a variety of settings, directors and mediums. This kind of experimentation is what I want from the franchise nowadays. This entry never could have happened in any other era of Godzilla. Especially given that it felt like it was meant to be a successor to Shin Godzilla, with how he evolves over a number of unexpected designs before becoming the usual monster and quite a few explicit shot recreations. The Evangelion/Anno design DNA then inevitably trickles down with it (this is now the third Eva-esque Godzilla, after Kiryu & ShinG) as the Book of Revelations and blood-red sea are spotlighted. I was surprised (pleasantly so) at how hard to follow it was. Its design seemed to be that most of the episode was dedicated to exploring necessary pseudoscience concepts, then the start/end would return to the Godzilla conflict and put them into action while expecting you to recognise when he abruptly evolves or terraforms on your own.
Yet despite that, I was impressed with how much it still felt like a genuine Godzilla project. Not that I didn’t enjoy the Netflix film trilogy, but it was nice seeing something that still sorta felt like usual Godzilla. The music was cinematic and borrowed a lot of cues from the film discography. The choir version of the Godzilla March was a welcome surprise, since I always felt it a missed opportunity that Shiro Sagisu never did such a thing for Shin Godzilla’s score. Seeing all the movie character cameos in the ED was awesome too. Looking at it on Youtube I see people wishing that the series had been a plain adaptation like that, but I disagree. Having the series start with monsters roughly around the size of King Kong before scaling up to proper kaiju gave it a fresh feeling. Although the monster designs were certainly strange, they were unique. I especially liked Godzilla Aquatilis. Definitely the most transformative design for the monster ever. I honestly thought I was being led astray the first time it appeared with the Godzilla March, given how it incorporates design elements from Titanosaurus. Never would have imagined I’d see a red Godzilla, but I like it.
Hate to say it, but I think I may have finally fallen out of love with Imaishi’s over the top directing. Either that or I just wasn’t in the mood, because I could definitely still write a lot about how good all elements of its design are. Every part of the production is just phenomenal. Though I really didn’t enjoy Kill la Kill either when I last revisited it a few years ago and have therefore consciously held back from looking at Luluco again. A large part of me feels I might have just fallen out of favour with Imaishi’s insanity. I still have immense respect for their aesthetic identities, and especially TTGL’s writing, but wasn’t enjoying the active experience. Maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. Dunno. It’s almost like a timer has finally ticked over and a number of my longest-held favourites have undergone a refresh; knocking TTGL entirely off its pedestal, shifting Hyouka outside of top 10, questioning whether I can still appreciate school settings at my age, and realising that even just with part 1 alone FFVII Remake exceeds and potentially replaces the original for me. Among other rotations that are currently escaping me.
For a long time, I’ve had this theory that replacing Gurren Lagann’s second half with the recap movie would be a positive upgrade. The first half is a bunch of little battles and its recap movie therefore compromises its scale, while the second is basically a single continuous conflict so tightening it into a film can be beneficial. But when I said that, I had never actually tried this watch order. Just pitched it as a concept based on my appreciation of the second film’s pacing + better shot composition. I did rewatch it that way earlier this year and, well, to probably no one’s surprise it turns out that 1-15 then Movie 2 is not the ideal Gurren Lagann rewatch order after all. There are a few cinematic setpieces in film 2 which I really like (making Rossiu’s suicide attempt more ordinary, Arc-Gurren Lagann being the one to drill into the Cathedral Terra instead, the final shot of Simon saying farewell to Lagann before his wedding), and the redub is far punchier than the TV version, but you lose way too much of the initial timeskip exposition. Totally skipping out on how Kittan, Rossiu, Viral and Yomako-sensei have matured neuters the entire timeskip. I may still think that Chouginga Gurren Lagann through to the final battle are a touch more fluent in the film but its first hour suffers immensely.
Fun characters and setting. Road trip stories are always automatically a good time. I do feel a bit lost in the dual protagonist structure though. Not that it was confusing or hard to situate, as the show provides necessary information about the Takahara Academy, but that it’s clearly, obviously holding back the central clue of how this all relates to the Hiruko as an unapologetic sequel bait.
Favourites from the OST include:
- blue, blue sky
- desperate situation
- departure
- tension
- plan.exe
- heavy action
- a bird mark
- asakusa racing roots
- shoot the shadow
Killer soundtrack. I don’t immediately recognise Kensuke Ushio’s name, but I want to see what else he’s worked on…Eureka Seven, A Silent Voice, Devilman Crybaby, Tsukimonogatari, Ping Pong the Animation, Space Dandy, Aikatsu…Yeah okay, that makes sense.
Recently I decided that Kaina of the Great Snow Sea would be one of the seasonals I’ll watch this time. Except, it wasn’t recently. It was in January, apparently. Where did the (at the time of writing) last six months of the year even go? I feel like I’ve barely been cognizant of media moving around me. Anyway, having finally got around to watching the series I liked it a lot. It very much leaves me wanting to spend more time with the characters. Especially to see what the Black Armour chick is about.Like all CG anime that part of it does inevitably create a filter at the start but once you get over that it’s a deceptively solid product all around. Its soundtrack is great, covering a range from suffocating symphonies that are used in the shocking mech battle at the end, to mystical locales, and chaotic didgeridoo battle themes, to accompany its exciting sword fight scenes. They even sneak in a cheeky handful of Sawano tracks. Despite the initial woes of a CG anime its art direction and world design are both beautiful, really flaunting the haunting beauty of the Snow Sea and Canopy through gorgeous landscape shots, and the somewhat slower pacing as the characters move through the world gives it ample time to soak in. The world and lore feels very reminiscent of Nausicaa, Girls Last Tour and Xenoblade 2. It’s not as decisive as prior years, but I think I’ll settle on this as my pick for anime of the year.
Nice to see this adapted.
Loved the Atelier-esque fantasy setting. Great character designs and some serviceable idol tracks. I did find it fascinating how the extent to which this actually was not an idol show but rather that the idol course was one stream inside the magic academy.
Great concept, fun deuteragonists. The superhero comedy bits make me regret how long I’ve had Astro Fighter Sunred on hold.
okay so i made it about 40 seconds into this before pausing upon something which may become relevant for later discussion and basically love live is a cool anime series because it always does this
Really enjoyable. Gonna be hard getting used to Mari’s silhouette not having horns anymore. The new art style is pretty fresh and I have appreciated the comparative lack of fanservice, given how littered with it the SIP/Sunshine duology are. Not that I’m against fanservice as a concept, but that I find it really pace-breaking and obstructive in a series such as Love Live, which has so many strengths that they don’t need to bend like that. With that said however, for me Sunshine in the Mirror is surely not going to be invalidating the main series. In a lot of ways it feels like a musical fantasy show with LLS imagery just slapped on top, since the characters don’t really act like themselves and it lacks the same rugged thematic + symbolic core. What I’m really fixated on in Love Live is that strangeness to the setting. Where it’s mostly played as a real-world setting, yet the more you pay attention the more you begin to feel the presence of some unseen magic or deeply symbolic force, or that the characters are almost self-aware/playing a role. To me that dissonance is where the capacity to discuss the series so at length comes from, because it creates deeper layers to what the show is doing and how the characters interact with the world around them. A regular fantasy spinoff where magic explicitly exists loses that subtlety. That it exists in isolation also means that it separates from the long-running cultural evolution across the four main Love Live series so there probably won’t be anything to essay upon there either.
Yeah. I get why this was such a hit. The production qualities are solid all around (Imigi Muru character designs!) and the characters are delightful. Chisato is such an immediately likable character. It’s fun watching her attempt to pry open Takina, and the other members of LycoReco are all quirky and endearing. A stellar ensemble all around.
It’s a fun series. Gag comedy is a good genre. During its run this was a manga I always anticipated updates to because of how effortlessly its cast blends with the off-kilter humour. The animation lets Ranka come across as even more spastic and the voice actors in the adaptation are perfect fits for each character, so the whole thing feels like a natural extension of the manga.
Really great adaptation for one of the current pillars of romcom manga.
Similar to Millennium Actress, the way that Satoshi Kon creatively distorts space to move between scenes is super cool. Perhaps even unmatched.
Pompo good, huh. I’m not super into cinema so a lot of that fandom + celebrity passion prevalent in the film is wasted on me, but the way its thematic revelations and multiple specific lines of dialogue are all used as instruction to interact with the visual design is super cool. What does Peterzen say is most important for a director? To him it’s visual sense, because everything else will conform. The film embodies that sentiment. Pompo says that a film shouldn’t exceed 90 minutes. The film closes out right at 90. Gene says that his film should be an inspiration for people who are feeling crushed like he is, and so in the denouement Alan quietly gains motivation just from reading a newspaper and seeing an article on its success. The focus of Pompo the Cinephile is on creating as many of these visual-thematic overlaps as they can within the digestible runtime. It’s very artistic in structure. And the constant sense of movement felt in the bombardment of creative transitions reminded me of Satoshi Kon’s work quite a bit, which is obviously a great boon. At times I could have mistaken it for Paprika, and that’s praise!
Good characters and art. The musical bits were all cheesy, but there were a number of nice bgm tracks.
A film that proves Shinkai is continuing to evolve as a director and writer. While I ultimately preferred the premise and characters of Weathering With You, this film does cement to me that he’s genuinely refining his skill and exploring new ideas after Your Name was effectively the perfected form of the story he’d been trying his whole career to tell. Great music, gorgeous Shinkai visuals and a fun road trip plotline. Plus bonus points for accidentally having a LLS reference in the mikan girl named Chika who lives in a ryokan.
A fun comedy series. And considering how these girls slice of life/comedy anime usually go, it’s really fresh to see Mia’s crush on Abel developing.
A fair effort. Converting the 4koma pages into 12 minute segments does inevitably make some of the joke timing less punchy and the character designs aren’t as sleek as they were in the manga, but the dynamics are still fun and it’s done some expressive things with the animation. I vaguely feel like Misuzu lost some of her bite in the switch from 4koma to anime episodes. When she says something harsh it immediately continues to the next scene, compared to the daily manga which left its punchlines to ruminate. She can’t mic drop in the same manner due to the change in format. The anime is full colour so she doesn’t have the sharp black ink in her visuals either, which does actually influence my perception of her too. Whereas Tomo and Jun are benefited by having animated slapstick + fights, and Carol’s chaos is further amplified by the bright colours and her deadpan voice acting.
Ever since witnessing the 2008 special a modern season of Urusei Yatsura had been one of my biggest held dream projects for anime. A modest dream I truly never would have believed had any chance of coming to fruition. But lo and behold. It’s Urusei Yatsura in the year 2022. And it’s good! The new art style breathes such life into this as a pair project with the original, and the voice actors all do a fantastic job fitting into the characters.
skapbadoa 
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