Man does anime love to geek out over oddly-specific stuff. That can be a real trip when, like Silver Spoon, it hits on something personal.
Category: Anime
Guilty Crown, Supercell, and Showcases
Guilty Crown is available to stream on Hulu and on Funimation’s website. I appreciate Guilty Crown quite a lot. I am also acutely aware that Guilty Crown is not a great show. Its plot is a busy, haphazard mess. The characters are outlandishly over-designed (some brazenly feeding the male gaze). Even the title is kinda sorta really stupid. And …
Megalobox and Invented Nostalgia
Megalobox is available to stream on Netflix and Crunchyroll Everybody loves the good ol’ days, huh? Reboots and revisits are nothing new; how many times have we told and retold the story of The Magnificent Seven Samurai? Doesn’t Peter Cullen get tired of being tapped for a new Transformers continuity every other year? Didn’t Fullmetal Alchemist get remade less than five …
Komi-san, Gokushufudou, and Single-Concept Comedies
I adore Gokushufudou. It's also a remarkably static, one-note comedy. And yet it pulls some clever tricks to get away with that supposedly-narrow thesis.
Mobile Suit Gundam and On-Ramps
Everybody seems to be picking up an extra hobby right now, after all, and model-kit-building has always struck me as a fun pastime. Except when it immediately becomes a time trap.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 and Perseverance
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is available to stream on Hulu, HiDive, and VRV. When the world becomes inherently stressful, people’s taste for fiction tends to gravitate toward one of two directions: Escapism, running pell-mell in the opposite direction from dreary reality (the Animal Crossing approach)Terror or tragedy, leaning right into the stress of it all (the Grindhouse or Grave of the …
One Week Friends and Distancing
One Week Friends is available to stream on Crunchyroll, HiDive, and VRV. Anime has a tendency to pull some weird concepts out of its collective hat. See, for example, the the buddy comedy film where Buddha and Jesus share an apartment. Or the show about an after-school club for piloting (remarkably accurately-drawn) tanks as a …
Stars Align and Rock Bottom
Everybody loves a comeback story. They're flat-out inspiring. But like in Stars Align, to get back up again, you have to get knocked down first.
Pokémon Twilight Wings and Credit
The very first thing to excite me about Pokémon: Twilight Wings was its staff in Studio Colorido. But that’s hardly reflected at all in its international release.
A Certain Scientific Railgun and Designated Protagonists
Stock characters are, generally, delightful. The exception tends to be protagonists, and for all I love anime, it suffers a lot from lead characters being the flattest members of their casts.
Final Fantasy and Identity
It always kind of astounds me whenever someone says that they’re a fan of the Final Fantasy series. Not because any individual entry in the series is that bad. More because the series is so wildly inconsistent.
Your Lie in April and Flags
The kind of people who will read a media blog are, on the whole, the kind of people who consume a lot of stories to begin with. And once you take in enough of them (probably by the time you're in middle school, really), you start to see certain patterns keep showing up.
Digimon Adventure and Togetherness
Digimon Adventure is available on Hulu. Digimon Adventure Tri is available on Crunchyroll. Neither service has them both – aren’t streaming rights fun? One of the worst things about anime is, funnily enough, also one of its greatest strengths: on a whole, the writing tends to wear its heart on its sleeve. It enables everything …
Pokémon and The Drawing Board
I’m a long-time fan of the Pokémon franchise, including one of the longest-running animated series still being produced. Now, the Pokémon anime looks to be lining up the TV-season equivalent of a Greatest Hits album.
Yatterman Night and Re-Interpretation
Who doesn't love spitballing ideas? That's an avenue that anime knows how to walk rather well.
This Thing Is Neat 