So here we are again, another arc finished and a pile of new factors to consider. This one felt like getting a lot of new pieces that don’t necessarily fit together in a neat way.
Continue reading “Trying to figure out Higurashi Gou: Watadamashi-hen edition”
So Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni has been one of my favourite pieces of media ever since I started getting into anime in general back in 2011ish. For all their flaws I still consider the 2006/7 adaptations among my favourites and I’ve rewatched them half a dozen times over the last decade. So when it was announced that they were getting a remake this year I was pretty interested obviously. If nothing else I was hoping for a more accessible entry point to the series for newcomers; a slightly more polished take without the reputation for being a bit janky the original adaptations had.
Episode 1 rolled around and it was more or less exactly that; aside from a weirdly unsubtle stinger with Rika at the end and a handful of scenes given more/less time it was a fairly straight remake of the first episode of the 2006 anime. This left me with sort of mixed feelings; It’s nice to have it back and filling that space I was expecting it to but at the same time, why does this need to exist? Jank aside the old anime were perfectly servicable and so watching this would just be seeing the same stuff all over again with a new lick of paint. Then episode 2 came out and threw all that out the window.
Continue reading “Trying To Figure Out Higurashi Gou: Onidamashi-hen Edition”
All right 12 days was fun lets get right into the new year with… Wait… What do you mean it’s the middle of March?! Maybe some day I’ll be able to stick to a consistent posting schedule but what the hey.
So this year I decided to open the new decade with a little project. I initially got into anime in a big way around 2011, I watched a handful of things before then but that’s definitely the point where it became one of my main interests. Because of this the 2000s have always sort of felt like a decade of anime I just narrowly missed out on engaging with. I’ve watched a handful of things from the era but there’s something aluring about going back to what I missed. Combined with a fascination with generally obtuse anime that have slipped out of the discourse I decided I’d use this year to watch forgotten anime from the 2000s. The criteria are pretty vague: 1) aired from 2000 to 2009 2) I hadn’t heard of it or was only sort of vaguely aware it existed and haven’t seen anyone really talk about it much. I’m about 20 or so entries into the list so far (I’ve been watching a lot of anime recently for a change!) and there have been a few solid entries and a lot of so-so stuff but that’s sort of what I expected going in. And then there’s Figure 17. A series I had genuinely never heard of until I started compiling the list, which meant I went into it with zero expectations. And it blew me away. Continue reading ““See You Tomorrow” – Death and Separation in Figure 17″
I’ll preface this by saying that I legitimately love Heybot, I’ll repeatedly call it “bad” in this post, but that’s absolutely a sincere compliment. Heybot is simultaneously one of the most incoherent and the most coherent anime I’ve ever encountered. While this might seem like an obviously self contradictory statement it’s one I’ll absolutely stand by, Heybot’s rapidfire nonsense might appear like so much arbitrary randomness to begin with but it’s actually incredibly internally consistent. Very little in the show is actually random, as much as it might seem like it at first. Continue reading ““It’s okay to be incoherent” – Heybot! and the art of nonsense”
Time to talk about one of my favourite shorts ever. Making that kind of declaration about a series literally made in MikuMikuDance about a group of characters standing in the same place failing to make jokes for 11 episodes may seem odd, but it’s true.
Note: It’s more or less impossible to explain just how well made Straight Title Robot Anime actually is without giving away the punchline, so by necessity I’ll be spoiling the ending here. I’d highly recommend watching the show first, even if it doesn’t look like anything special. Continue reading “Straight Title Robot Anime: Laughing Till The End”
Last season’s Hinako Note is an anime with some major identity issues. It’s an example of a series trying to be too many things at once and, ultimately, not really managing to be any of them. Continue reading “Hinako Note is too many things.”
Welcome to the first installment of what I hope will become a regular thing, the Shorts Roundup for the Winter 2017 anime season.
I watch a lot of short anime. As I’ve said previously, I try to watch all of them if I can, because they’re a great way of experiencing lots of different kinds of shows with a minimal time investment. A lot of them are kind of bad, but that’s fine, all you lose is a couple of minutes. And sometimes you strike gold.
Given that I watch so many of the things, I thought I’d turn that into an excuse to actually write something for a change. So let’s get to it. Continue reading “Winter 2017 Shorts Roundup”
Magical Girl Raising Project is not a Magical Girl anime. It’s an anime which happens to have Magical Girls in it. But that’s an important distinction. It’s just too hateful to qualify.
Continue reading “Magical Girl Raising Project: Genre Destruction.”
I hate Macross II, it’s blight upon a franchise I love. It’s a cynical cash in that takes superficial elements from the original; without understanding how or why they worked and rehashes them into a miserable pile of bad. And now I’m going to say something vaguely positive about the series. I think I get what they were going for.
It can be hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I fell in love with a series. For Macross Frontier it’s easy.
The Anime Duck Compendium 