In a year where I actively chose to experience the anime of yesteryear the anime industry seemed determined to meet me halfway. This year had an awful lot of reboots and long after the fact sequels. So that was neat.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 12: A Year of Comebacks”
Magia Record’s first season ends with a visually impressive fight between two characters from a different story. This unfortunately feels emblematic of the show as a whole, it puts so much effort into capturing the feeling of the original Madoka Magica that it ends up burying its own story.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 11: Magia Record and the Shadow of the Predecessor”
Popotan is a series with a handful of interesting ideas which it never commits to quite enough to be genuinely good. Occasionally it comes close though, with one particular pair of episodes standing out in particular.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 10: Popotan’s Left Behind Children”
Isekai stories as a genre are pretty much inherently rooted in power fantasies. It’s a genre built around wish fulfillment, the idea of being able to escape the mundane world to somewhere else that appreciates you. Obviously there are deliberate subversions of this knocking around but for the most part it’s really not surprising these kinds of stories are popular with how alienating modern society can be. A major conceit of a lot of these stories is that the protagonist, either through some power granted to them by whatever force sent them to this new world or just by virute of having knowledge outside the context of that world, ends up achieving some level of power or significance within their new setting, again, it’s understandably an appealing idea. Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear offers its own version of this fantasy; what if you could just be nice?
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 9: The Nice Power Fantasy of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear”
Penguin Musume♥Heart is one the most aggressively 2000s anime I watched this year. Essentially a protracted love letter to the anime and otaku culture trends of the era, in a lot of ways it was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for with this project. This devotion to celebrating the stuff that influenced is at times the show’s strong point but also periodically its biggest weakness, there were plenty of 2000s anime tropes that vanished for the better after all. Where it’s at its absolute strongest though is its special, episode 11.5. In this episode the cast make a MAD.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 8: Penguin Musume, the MAD”
Sometimes you run into a series that by most metrics it’s hard to call Good, but which ends up being enjoyable anyway. Saint October is very firmly in that category. I can’t say I’d recommend it without caveats but I still had a lot of fun watching it.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 7: Saint October World”
As is now something of a tradition for my 12 days posts, day 6 is our 5th annual Short awards. Every year I use this day to highlight some of the more interesting short anime that aired over the course of the year. In any year the quality of short anime tends to vary wildly and that held true here for the most part. On the plus side there wasn’t much in the way of actively unpleasant stuff like some previous years have had so good job on that front 2020. Anyways, lets get into it shall we.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 6: Short Awards 2020”
After spending the first third of this post series trapped in the 2000s it’s time to take a break and acknowledge that I did in fact watch some new stuff this year.
Every now and then something comes along that appears to be laser targeted at my specific weaknesses. Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle is very firmly in that camp. Possibly because of my own dreadful sleep patterns I have a pronounced weakness for sleepy characters, so it was sort of a given I’d end up watching this one. Fortunately it turned out to be one of my favourite shows of the year. After the first episode I wasn’t sure if the concept had enough depth for an entire season but it’s handily proved me long. It helps that the titular princess is just awful.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 5: A Tired, Terrible Princess”
Himawari! is a series with a lot of weird escalation going on. Another entry on the list of things from the 2000s nobody remembers, this particular one is especially cursed to be forgotten given it’s about a ninja named Himawari and therefore doomed to SEO oblivion at the hands of Boruto’s Dad’s daughter. The first season is alright, with the cast mostly just engaging in some low stakes shenanigans around their ninja school. And then season 2 escalates everything wildly.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 4: Micro-Ninjas? Himawari’s Nonsense Escalation”
I continue to be a sucker for mascot Cures apparently. Continuing my long long trip through the 12 years worth of Precure that aired before I got into the franchise, this year I got to Yes Precure 5 and it’s sequel series GoGo! Yes5 is probably my favourite of the early entries to date, while I definitely have some issues with it (that the series insists on shipping Nozomi and Komachi with Coco and Nuts is very firmly Not Great) but for the most part it has a really strong cast, some fun villains and is generally super solid all around. GoGo is fine. Most of the time it just feels like more of the same, but it doesn’t have the momentum of the previous series and often feels like it’s running back the same ideas its predecessor had. It does have Milky Rose though so it’s clearly good actually.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 3: Milky Rose”
The Anime Duck Compendium 