What’s this – a shounen supervillain appears in Bakuman of all places? This is, to say the least, an interesting development. Not least because it represents a real sea change for Bakuman in the way it approaches its story. The series is expert at drawing characters who dance delicately perched […] Read more
It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that my view on Little Busters and the general zeitgeist are two ships passing in the night, likely never to meet again. But in the immortal words of George Costanza, “Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care.” I’ve been spending weeks trying to figure […] Read more
By the immutable laws of shoujo, no episode as full of sunny brightness as this one was for 15 minutes could possibly go unpunished. I like Sukitte quite a bit, but I think it’s fair to say it’s very much playing to type. This is a shoujo romance manga through […] Read more
Truth be told, I’m a little worried about where Space Brothers is headed from here. This is without question one of my favorite shows of 2012, but when your favorite moment of the episode is the sign-off from Sanpei Yuuko after the preview (“Nan ja kore??”), you know it wasn’t […] Read more
I can count on one hand the times in a year an anime makes me LOL just in appreciation for the awesome, but that’s probably the third or fourth time Hunter X Hunter has done it. If psychological intensity is your bag, it would be hard to top H x […] Read more
What the heck did I just see? Yesterday was “Movie Day” in Tokyo, when theaters make all seats “only 1000 yen on the 1st of the month. I took advantage of the opportunity to see Eva Q, which is the biggest box-office hit of the year in Japan and causing […] Read more
I think Btooom! can be summed up pretty well in one perfect line of dialogue: “Nice work, Cripple.” There’s a sort of purity in the way Btooom! views the human race with almost perfect disgust that makes it fascinating to watch. From the evisceration of whole groups of people (doctors, […] Read more
That was quite simply another example of magnificent theater from Zetsuen no Tempest. There’s absolutely nothing else like this series, and there hasn’t been for a while. It’s old-school anime for sure, classic BONES, but it’s so old-school that it feels as much like Shakespeare of even Sophocles – and […] Read more
Sometimes the fact that you know an event is coming does nothing to lessen the impact. That was probably the most emotionally devastating anime episode of the year, and though I know – as always – there will be some who heap criticism on it for this that or the […] Read more
The pieces continue to be fit together in increasingly interesting ways. I have a lot of respect for Robotics;Notes. It’s not taking shortcuts either with its storytelling or character development, not (often, anyway) resorting to low-hanging fruit for audience gratification, and seems to be putting it’s stock in a slow-build […] Read more