The late entries for Spring 2011 continue to be a hugely impressive bunch. Ao no Exorcist joins the fray with yet another excellent premiere episode that promises fascinating things to come. You can definitely see director Tesai Okamura’s Darker Than Black chops showing through this first episode – the feel […] Read more
I only dared to speculate in my RK post last month, and I’ve been hoping for it for a decade, but we finally have news today that Rurouni Kenshin has a new anime project in the works. It would hard to overstate how important RK is to my identity as […] Read more
Honestly compels me to opine that this third episode of Hansaku Iroha was not nearly as good as the first two episodes. Admittedly, they set a pretty high bar, and this certainly wasn’t terrible. But while I don’t dislike a change of pace, especially in a two-cour series like this […] Read more
Memo to Japan: Just what the fuck are you thinking? I would really love to know who gave the green light to this series. An anime – three cours, no less, from early reports – about a tea master. Just who, exactly, is the target audience for this thing? Besides, […] Read more
Sigh. Only two episodes in and, and where do we go from here? After last week’s premiere involving endless strings of sex jokes and Azazel-san, this week we meet Beelzebub. While he’s supposedly demon royalty, he also not only eats poop, but has the ability to make any other living […] Read more
The OVA version of Yozakura Quartet continues to be far superior to the TV series, with Ryochimo Sawa’s signature look and direction continuing to lend a very distinctive style to this challenging manga adaptation. Unfortunately the animation quality seems to have taken a dip since the first episode, with some […] Read more
Woot, with the second half of Gosick we have a new ED. We get so few multi-cour series nowadays that I forget about OP/ED changes. In any case, I liked the new one quite a bit – the song is pretty good, a sort of “Greensleeves”-ish medieval sounding ballad – […] Read more
Spring 2011’s late-bloomer profile deepens with another under-the-gun entry, this time the eagerly anticipated (be me, anyway) anime adaptation of Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou’s excellent manga, Deadman Wonderland. And based on the first episode, it doesn’t disappoint. There are relatively few manga adaptations the prospect of which gets me […] Read more
Tiger & Bunny strayed dangerously close to overused cliche territory this week, but it gets some small measure of pardon for at least acknowledging it. Bomb about to blow up, which wire to cut? Surely it doesn’t get any more cliched than that. This show is walking a fine line. […] Read more
I have a lot to talk about with this one, starting with the fact that it faced by far the highest expectations for any Spring series in my eyes. And, in the event, it managed to live up to them almost completely. That’s really something to celebrate. There are so […] Read more