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”
Penguin Musumeā„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”
One recurring theme of this year’s dive into forgotten series of the 2000s has been series which,. while I could definitely see their strengths, didn’t quite click for me. But at the same time even a lot of those series had their little moments where they really shone. Nagasarete Airanto was very firmly in that category. I could see what it was aiming for and I didn’t hate it but it never quite hit the point where I could say I really enjoyed it. Episode 10 though? Episode 10 was special.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 2: Nagasarete Airanto – Rainy Day Friends”
Well it’s that time of year again, when I decide that, after a full year of producing almost no writing, it’s a good idea to try and produce 12 posts in 12 days. This is actually the 5th year running so that’s kind of a neat milestone if I can keep it up.
So towards the end of last year I had a silly idea. I first started getting really into anime around 2011, I dabbled before but it was mostly just rewatching stuff from my childhood, 2011 was the year I started actively following airing shows and diving into the endless backlog of older stuff. An effect of this all is that I narrowly missed out on seeing a lot of the anime of the 2000s. Obviously there have been a handful of things I’ve actively gone back and sought out after the fact but also there are inevitably things I’d just never heard of. So I decided to mark this new decade by spending a year watching things from an old one. For all of 2020 the only non airing anime I’ve watched have been from 2000-2009.
Continue reading “12 Days 2020, Day 1: A New Old Decade.”
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″
The Anime Duck Compendium 