| 8:32pm | Reconstructing the Another novel – part 1 | | | | (Another was originally a book by Yukito Ayatsuji. With news of a translation yet to appear, I’m trying to reconstruct the novel from the first three episodes of the anime series) I woke up in the hospital. It felt like I had been dreaming, but there was clichéd narration and an awful, terrible... |
| 6:06pm | Aural pleasure | | | | A few years ago I almost lost the hearing in my left ear. The gory details are best omitted, but I was left with (what the doctors claimed) was 20-30% hearing and only two thirds of the bones I should. For all intents and purposes I was deaf in that ear, a lopsided and mono world where car alarms didn’t... | | |
| 9:31pm | 3 Episode Taste Test: Nisemonogatari | | | | You don’t come to Nisemonogatari (lit. Impostory) for the plot or characters, you come to it to watch an art director take an LSD trip through modernist architecture and a paint-palette orgy. You come for the in-jokes and the riffs on other media. You come to listen to what few other series ever... |
| 8:56pm | 3 Episode Taste Test: Bodacious Space Pirates | | | | “What are you watching?” “It’s about a rebellion and government sponsored mercenaries, but in space.” “What’s it called?” “Bodacious Space Pirates” “” “” “Want to watch a documentary on polar bears?” These... |
| 11:29pm | Working`!! | | | | On the surface Working`!! has very little going for it. Sliding off the back of the first series the second introduces no major new jokes or any characters of substance, the animation is scrappy and there’s no drama that isn’t wholly manufactured. Telling then that the most exciting part... |
| 11:10pm | Un-Go | | | | The adage of “always leave the audience wanting more” is becoming increasingly apt for Studio Bones. Like with Bounen no Xam’d before it, Un-Go’s creativity and, most of all, possibilities make the run-time almost criminally short. Especially when the concept – a detective... |
| 1:35am | Ben-to | | | | Ben-to is completely crackers. And, for a while, you can believe it knows how crackers it is. Then it runs out of steam and its concept can no longer sustain what is already pretty flimsy. “why are the twins are fighting for discount food given their nouveau-rich status?” It’s in... |
| 5:31pm | Mawaru Penguindrum | | | | Darling of the erudites and intellectuals, Mawaru Penguindrum is a series quite unlike any other. A visual and cerebral feast, it explores the ideas of fate, of families and, as the title would suggest, penguins. Its allegories and layers however are unfortunately but an enticing mask for a flaky and... | | |
| 1:47am | Guilty Crown: An Interpretation of Episode 01 | | | | Pew pew pew! I’m totally a lighthouse and not an interpretation of the Tokyo Sky Tower!I’m soooooo naked!I’m so angsty I watch my pornography on the roof*POW* *BOOM*I knew I should have worn clothing more appropriate for a secret mission! Hello, I’m your bothersome childhood friend.... |
| 10:17pm | Baka to Test to Shokanju Ni (Idiots, Tests and Summoned Beasts 2) | | | | There is no way of reviewing humour. It’s always personal and at the mercy of such fickleness as “I wasn’t in the mood”. Enough then to say that Baka Test is my kind of humour; the kind where the jokes are obvious from the setup but the punchline is so much more over-the-top... |
| 10:36pm | Blood-C | | | | To resurrect their Blood franchise, Production I.G. enlisted the help of CLAMP to spawn the latest entry, Blood-C. Beginning like a relic of the past with stereotypical do-gooder Saya, candy-sweet twins, a mysterious café owner and flowery nonsense spouted by an unseen narrator, the opening episodes... | | |
| 7:57pm | Usagi Drop | | | | Usagi Drop proves that good characters and a solid story never go out of fashion. It divorces itself from so many anime tropes – big eyes, sparkles, eyecatches – that it seems hard to understand why it was animated in the first place. With both the time-spanning manga and feature film recently... |
| 7:44pm | Protagonists and you | | | | I’m on a quest to understand exactly why I like the anime that I do. It’s relatively easy to enumerate which ones I like more than others, MyAnimeList exists more-or-less exactly for this purpose, but that doesn’t really explore what makes a show excellent beyond an attempt to pattern-match... | | |
| 10:00pm | 3 Episode Taste Test: Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt | | | | How do you make a series laden with references to violence, sex and bodily excretions starring two thoroughly unpleasant women entertaining? If Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is any indication, you give it to GAINAX. Suffering the same initial incredulity as Lucky Star’s promotional material... | | |
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