September 2010
2 posts
An announcement
These last seven months have been a great experience—I’m grateful for the warm welcome I’ve gotten from the ‘sphere, and this blog has been a fun and challenging way to get myself to think more deeply about anime as a whole.
But I want to work my way deeper into that, and Tumblr’s no longer a convenient way to accomplish that.
So from here on I’ll be hosted on...
4 tags
Ookami-san and her enigmatic finale
Between the amount of plot resolved, the skipped OP and the rearranged ED timing, signs would indicate that 11 was the final continuity-relevant episode of Ookami-san and her Seven Companions, and that 12 is likely an unrelated “bonus” episode. While the ending seems to have disappointed many, I think the episode managed to do quite a lot, and recalled much of what made episode 05 such...
August 2010
1 post
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Highschool of the Dead; what I'm doing here
I’m watching Highschool of the Dead as a fun show. I watch it, primarily, for the action and the sex and the production values. That is what I download it for—the adrenaline.
But, if its writing weren’t excellent, if its characters weren’t well-developed, if everything but the animation were lazy and shoddily-done, that wouldn’t be a proper defense of any flaws it might...
July 2010
3 posts
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Ookami-san and viewer fantasies
With five episodes aired, Ookami-san and her Seven Companions has, to many, shown itself to be a slickly-produced but generally vapid bit of entertainment: while its fairy-tale allusions give it a lush and full world in which to play out, little of any real significance has been done with them. However, just below the surface, Ookami-san seems about to bubble over with some truly intriguing ideas....
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Shukufuku no Campanella: the logical extreme of...
With three episodes aired, Shukufuku no Campanella is a competent show by many standards - it sports an impressive voice cast, decent animation and fun character designs. However, those elements outside of its production values tell a very different story. The setting, plot, characters and dialogue are all extremely simplistic and one-dimensional; but the way they are presented suggests not so...
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Technology and the western otaku subculture
A friend on Twitter mentioned the hold Tanabata seems to have on the western otaku. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Tanabata in particular or if there was some relevance to Japanese festivals in general. Particularly in America, our landscape of cultural celebrations and holidays is negotiated in significantly different terms: of our cultural celebrations which permeate most of the...
June 2010
5 posts
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Arakawa Under The Bridge and hiding from the "real...
Akiyuki Shinbou’s latest project, Arakawa Under The Bridge, has nearly drawn to a close, with its thirteenth and final episode airing next week. The show has so far, in true Shinbou style, played its thematic ideas close to the chest, slowly building up characters and grand ideas via his trademark comedic pacing and eccentric visual delivery. In episode 12, we see the most explicit...
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Tatami Galaxy's haunting ending theme
Mr. Avisch at The Fool wrote a great article on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back, ending with a note about the ending theme, calling it “haunting” and “morose” and noting how its mood seems to conflict with the tone of the series itself. That had me thinking a bit more about the song than I usually think about ending themes when I noticed that the strange, conflicting...
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B Gata H Kei and the appeal of incompetence
Episode 10 of B Gata H Kei was uncharacteristically fast-paced, given the tone the last few episodes have set. It hearkened back to the frantic pacing of the first episode, in more ways than one.
In particular, the final scene of the episode brought with it the culmination of a subtle secondary idea the show has been building up to in Kanejou. From her first appearance at the school festival, and...
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The enigmatic intentions of Ichiban Ushiro no...
Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou was, I think, this season’s biggest long shot - though it teased viewers from the beginning with the groundwork of a brilliant dramatic premise, the first handful of episodes seemed to ground it firmly as a harem anime, while the ED did its best convincing us that that was the intent. Despite this, between episodes 05 and 10 the show has certainly cemented its...
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Affection and inauthenticity in The Tatami Galaxy
2DT mentioned at the end of a great post on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back that he noticed some similarities between Tatami’s Akashi and Bakemonogatari’s Senjougahara. This made a few things click for me, as I hadn’t yet been able to get a grasp on what fascinated me so about Akashi.
The clearest and most obvious comparison is, as 2DT noted, their...
May 2010
1 post
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The Tatami Galaxy and our inevitable mistakes
The Tatami Galaxy (Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei), in its three aired episodes, has drawn comparisons for both its unique visual style and frantic delivery to the work of acclaimed studio Shaft under director Akiyuki Shinbou. However, there is little to this comparison beyond the fact that Tatami and Akiyuki Shinbou’s work can be ambiguously categorized as visually “abstract” -...
April 2010
4 posts
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B Gata H Kei, nostalgia and shows with guts
B Gata H Kei has certainly been a ride so far - I had this theory building up for episodes 1-3 that under its absurd premise the show was best classified as a “monogamous harem” - the sort of harem characterized by Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi and the like - which has been somewhat on the decline in recent years.
The cast of girls in a monogamous harem are there primarily, if not purely,...
4 tags
K-ON!! hits its stride
My unwarranted optimism for K-ON!! seems to, as of episode 3, be paying off. The hinting at more serious development of the maturity angle wasn’t just a fluke, and they’re actually managing it well this time.
Episode 2 was reasonably explicit in its reference to Azusa’s growing estrangement from the others, shown in the straightfaced moment where Azusa noticed the freshmen...
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Ashita wa, donna hi ni naru kana?
Hidamari Sketch is over.
Yes, the most recent season is over, but in a more broad sense I’d posit that we won’t be seeing a fourth season in the style of Hoshimittsu. Shaft seem to have said about all they can with this.
Episode 12 of Hoshimittsu essentially wrapped up everything I proposed in my previous HS post. Nazuna and Nori have become part of the Hidamari Apartments in-group:...
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K-ON!!, growing up, and the heart of slice-of-life
So, the first episode of the new season of K-ON!! has aired, and under all but the most superficial scrutiny it’s a completely different show - whether for better or for worse, one can’t yet know. But it’s definitely not just another 13 episodes of K-ON!. I side firmly with the crowd who loved the hell out of season 1 - it sits among the 10/10s on my MyAnimeList account, for a...
March 2010
3 posts
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Time in Hidamari Sketch
Shaft’s anime adaptation of the slice-of-life comic strip Hidamari Sketch is marked by the studio’s distinctive and sometimes bewildering animation style, an excellent cast of voice actors and a markedly leisurely pace, even in the context of its genre. It is made particularly unique by its timeline: the events of the first two seasons unfolded in nonlinear order - a handful of...
new post on the way. this could come in handy. →
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Repost: I liked Endless Eight.
I originally posted this on my old Wordpress blog; I’m plagiarizing myself here because I think the tone and style of this essay is a good summary of what I want this blog to look like overall. Fresh content to follow, one hopes.
It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, and they probably could have done better by their fans than eating up over half of the long-awaited...