As so often seems to be the case with anime, the current season is on-course to be a near-total contrast to the one that came before. And likewise in keeping with recent precedent, the general impressions I had of it going in look to have been largely accurate.

Winter was all about quality over quantity, with three really strong seres – all locks for the year-end top 10 – anchoring what was generally a threadbare schedule. While small by spring standards this season was considerably larger than winter, and my preview reflected that. But it didn’t have much that stood out as a surefire classic (as Mob Psycho II did), and it hasn’t had anything that’s surpassed expectations enough to get onto the elite list (as Dororo has).

Put that together and you have a season that figured to have a lot of decent stuff in the middle but not much greatness, and that’s exactly how it’s played out so far. Indeed, this is the first season that I can recall without a single series in the “Elite” or “Outstanding” tier.  While the series I expected to be the top performers (Fruits Basket, Kono Oto Tomare, Mix) have largely met expectations, none has totally knocked it out of the park.  Between the two directorial heavyweights, Sarazanmai and Carole & Tuesday have shown their pedigrees – but I’m not sold on either one yet (though Sarzanmai is winning).  And none of the sleeper picks has been a revelation, though a few have indeed turned out to be pretty solid.

What that leaves us with is a schedule that’ decidedly middle-heavy – OK for decent to very good series but lacking the exceptional.  As “safety first” has become the mantra of production committees that’s more and more often been the case, but one always at least hopes spring will deliver the best season in any given year (not this one, to be sure).  Setting aside the chunk of genres that just aren’t on my radar screen, what’s left is a pretty standard mix of drama and comedy, fantasy and sci-fi, with a sprinkling of shoujo and sports.  It’s a season that’s, in a word, pretty generic – neither great nor awful, or bucking the trends of recent years in anime.

With that, to Spring 2019:

The Elite

None.

 

Outstanding

None

 

Very Good

Fruits Basket 2019
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B+
Comments: I came into this reboot of the iconic shoujo manga with somewhat mixed feelings, based largely on my deep affection for the first anime and mangaka Takaya-sensei’s fierce hostility towards it. But I’ll cheerfully admit, TMS has done a very solid job here. The production has been excellent (including both the OP and ED), and while the overall tone is somewhat more somber than the first anime, it’s captured the overall feel of the story very well. I do miss the original cast, especially Horie Yui – the new seiyuu are largely a notch below, but they’ve been fine on the whole.  Episode 4 did highlight some concerns going forward – namely that Akitarou Daichi’s deft touch is missed more with the comedic side of the series than the dramatic, and at smoothing over some of the manga’s decidedly rough edges.

Mix: Meisei Story 
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B+
Comments: This bucket was almost empty in winter, but it’s overflowing this season.  Mix may underwhelm a bit if all you know of Adachi Mitsuru is Cross Game. But that series is a unicorn – a torrid love affair at first sight that miraculously never turns sour – while Mix is much more a typical Adachi slow build. I hate the choice of Kaji Yuuki as Touma (have I mentioned that?) but the series has enough good stuff going on that it’s not a deal-breaker. This one is delivering exactly what I expected.

Kono Oto Tomare 
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B+
Comments: Kind of the same story here actually, except that the series I compare this one against is Chihayafuru (a torrid love affair that did go sour). Kono Oto Tomare is another slow builder that rewards patience. While the anime hasn’t proved to be a transformative one, taking an excellent manga and raising it to another level, it’s quite faithfully adapting the material on the page. The real magic starts when the extended music sequences do of course, so how well the anime deals with those is going to go a long way towards telling the tale of what heights it can reach.

Sarazanmai 
Episodes Watched: 3
Grade: B
Comments: Sarazanmai is on this list at #4 with a bullet – and the bullet may be coming right between the eyes. I never get too comfortable with an Ikuhara show, because it can all go south so quickly, and Sarazanmai has plenty of warning signs. But for three weeks, this has been a generally positive experience. Certainly this is the most visually interesting series of the spring, and the plot and characters are coherent enough to be somewhat engaging. I could do with a big reduction is the anal obsession, and Ikuhara’s trademark recycling of animation sequences tends to start getting annoying about now. But for all its loopiness I get the sense this is one of Ikuhara’s tamer series structurally – a fairly straightforward mahou shounen show with all the trimmings. And with him, tame and straightforward in moderation (which is the most you’ll ever get of them) strike me as potential positives.

One Punch Man Season 2 
Episodes Watched: 3
Grade: B
Comments: As I said in my Episode 2 post, I’m not going to piss away time discussing the drop in animation quality from the first season, which I see as a pointless exercise. If anything has really changed for me, it’s the fact that after Mob Psycho 100 I now know what ONE is capable of a writer, and OPM’s limitations are a little more noticeable. It’s still a very solid series, an interesting take on the hero genre and on Japan’s lost generations. Excepting the production side of things my impressions are that this season is running on a pretty comparable level to the first so far.

 

Worthwhile

Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B
Comments: I had quite a few sleeper picks coming into the season, but the clear standout in that department wasn’t one of them. It’s Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin, which I did preview but went into with very modest expectations. Modest is certainly how I’d describe the budget (charitably) but this manga adaptation about a group of occult civil servants in Shinjuku has delivered the goods in other ways. The premise is an excellent one, a very interesting take on a fairly common anime and manga setup, and it’s managed to pull off a surprisingly wide tonal range in its first three episodes.

Kimetsu no Yaiba
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B
Comments: Kimetsu no Yaiba is a great-looking, very traditional shounen that doesn’t aim too high but manages to be on-point most of the time.    The problem for me is that with so little defying expectation here, there’s not much to grasp onto whenever the execution falters a little (as it did in Episode 3).  Fortunately it doesn’t seem likely that’s going to happen too often, so I expect Kimetsu np Yaiba to be pretty reliably entertaining for its two-cour run (with a sequel very likely down the road).

Carole & Tuesday
Episodes Watched: 3
Grade: B-
Comments: Carole & Tuesday is the biggest disappointment of the season for me, not because it’s terrible but because any time you have a Watanabe Shinichirou series, you want it to be great.  While there are moments of Watanabe’s trademark visual brilliance, the writing – and crucially, music – are inoffensive to the point of blandness.  The insert songs have sounded like something you’d hear on the sound system at Uniqlo, and there’s a very safe, mass-appeal quality to the whole undertaking.  It’s also kind of lazy – the sci-fi elements feel totally superfluous and lack much imagination.  It’s not too late for things to change, but right now Carole & Tuesday is a show that plays as if it has no passion behind it, and inspires none as a result.

RobiHachi
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B-
Comments: There’s a lot of Space Dandy in Takamatsu Shinji’s sci-fi spoof, both in terms of plot and even tone.  But it lacks that show’s spark of creative daring and occasional genius.  RoboHachi is just in it for the jokes so far, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s not as hilarious as I’d like it to be but still fairly amusing fairly often.

Senryuu Shoujo
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: B-
Comments: It’s extremely cute, sometimes it’s quite funny, and full of stalkers.

 

Still Watching

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san
Episodes Watched: 3
Grade: B-
Comments: It’s pretty obvious that Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san knows exactly what it’s doing (the omakes prove that), which makes the whole enterprise feel rather more calculated and less genuine than ideal.  But it’s very effective and being the quite literal “healing” series, with Senko-san an appealingly cute heroine and some genuine laughs in her uneven adjustment to the modern human world.

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: C+
Comments: I don’t think YU-NO deserves anything like the shockingly negative reception it’s received.  There are some interesting elements here (like the preponderance of adult female foils for the protagonist rather than high school girls, and the main premise isn’t a bad one.  There are certainly pacing issues and the production values are indifferent, but it’s not a bad show by any means.

Gunjou no Magmell
Episodes Watched: 4
Grade: C+
Comments: Like many manhua adaptations Gunjou no Magmell at least stands out as being different than the mass-produced anime which clog the schedule every season (though not so appealingly as Jikken-hin Kazoku did).  The plots have been on the silly side thus far, but individual moments have been interesting.

Yatogame-chan kansatsu nikki
Episodes Watched: 3
Grade: C+
Comments: Tomatsu Haruka (a Nagoya native) is delivering some amusing moments as the heroine of this 3-minute short about a Tokyo boy who moves to Nagoya.  All the Nagoya in-jokes – no tourist attractions, the size of the shiro noir at Komeda Coffee – are here.

 

Incomplete:

Shingeki no Kyoujin Season 3 Part 2 
Episodes Watched: 1
Grade: N/A
Comments: Still here for now.  When “it” happens, we’ll see.

 

Dropped:

Shoumetsu Toshi, Fairy Gone, Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai, Kenja no Mago, Nande Koko ni Sensei ga!?

 

So with that, here’s this season’s blogging prospectus:

Monday:
Definitely Blogging: Dororo 

Tuesday:
Definitely Blogging: One Punch Man Season 2

Wednesday:
On the Bubble: Carole & Tuesday

Thursday:
Definitely Blogging: Sarazanmai

Friday:
Definitely Blogging: Fruits Basket 2019
Probably Blogging (sort of): Senryuu Shoujo

Saturday:
Definitely Blogging: Mix: Meisei Story, Kono Oto Tomare
Probably Blogging: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Sunday:
Definitely Blogging: Gegege no Kitarou (2018), Game of Thrones, Shingeki no Kyoujin
Probably Blogging: Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin

Manga: Otoyomegatari, Hunter X Hunter (hiatus)

Watching For Now: Gunjou no Magmell, RobiHachi, Sewaaki Kitsune no Senko-san, Yatogam-chan Kansatsu Nikki, Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo YU-NO