Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Let’s put last week’s unfortunate trainwreck behind us and move on, because Lupin III was pretty much back in its usual groove this week. Which is to say, it was sexy, stylish and funny while spinning an utterly preposterous story – this time […] Read more
Warning: Detour ahead. Sankarea has always been a show that wielded its many personalities like a billy club, but never more literally than this week. It transformed into a first-person narrated rumination by Wanko on the nature of the osananjimi relationship, with most of the episode spent in the distant […] Read more
The Truth is out there. There haven’t really been any lulls in this outstanding series so far, but there have been degrees of excellence – and I’d rank this episode up there with the very strongest episodes, which for me are the second (still the best overall) and the third. […] Read more
If you ask me what my favorite NoitaminA series this season is, my answer might have to be “What time is it?” Seriously – as a huge NoitaminA fan (albeit a disappointed one lately) I don’t say it lightly, but this is the best pair of shows the block has […] Read more
The questions sure piled up this week, but there weren’t many answers to go with them. A funny thing happened without my really realizing it – in spite of all the terrific anime this spring, Tsuritama became my favorite new series. It’s certainly the one I look forward to most […] Read more
Grizzly-san ED stays. He’s bad to the bone. It occurs to me, watching this week’s Shirokuma Café, that Polar Bear may be one of the biggest trolls in anime since Prince Baka from Level E, and the puns are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the way he, Panda-kun […] Read more
Time for a brief trip to the world of Japanese Cinema… Kore-eda Hirokazu isn’t a name that’ll be familiar to any but the most ardent art-house cinema buffs or serious Japanese culture geeks – but it should be. He’s a documentary trained director who’s turned his talents to narrative films that are […] Read more
The soccer diet is all the rage in Japan, apparently. We have a new pre-open and new eyecatches this week, as Ginga e Kickoff makes the transition from team-building to competing. One of the things I really like about this series is that it doesn’t ignore the small details, and […] Read more
“The Beginning of the Romantic Tale” Never, ever did I imagine that one day I’d be blogging new Rurouni Kenshin manga. It would be hard to overstate how important Watsuki Nobuhiro’s manga is to a certain stripe of fans, of a certain generation. RK was the first manga I finished, […] Read more
Jormungand rule #1: every boss must have a sexy, badass female bodyguard. After easily its two most emotionally transparent episodes to date, Jormungand is back testing the audience again with one closer to it’s earlier form. I’m hard pressed to think of a manga with a complicated plot that explains […] Read more