In contrast to so many shows of late, Shin Sekai Yori continues to power ahead with the unstoppable momentum of a runaway train. Well, From the New World did it again – another of those 22-minute episodes that felt like it ended just as the opening credits would be finishing […] Read more

This is the sort of series for which the phrase “The plot thickens” was invented. I’ve lavished a lot of praise on this series over the first 13 episodes, which is fine because I think it’s deserved all of it.  But I’m still finding myself struck by new things that […] Read more

Sometimes even in the darkest stories, you can find a glimmer of hope somewhere.  So far that isn’t the case with Shin Sekai Yori. This series continues to be both the most disturbing and most heartbreaking of the season for me.  The premise in fantastical, no doubt, but it’s been […] Read more

This train has been bearing down on us for weeks now, but there’s just no stopping it. In terms of pure emotional impact, Shin Sekai Yori is a show with few equals.  In a word, it’s ruthless – no measures are taken to soften the impact events have on the […] Read more

Trying to encapsulate an episode like that was always going to be tough, even under ideal circumstances. Shin Sekai Yori is a show that begs serious analysis, but at the moment I just don’t think I’m capable of it.  There’s something vaguely surreal about watching such a complex and unsettling […] 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

Shin Sekai Yori is once again comfortably the best series of the season. There’s a sense of foreboding that runs through “From the New World” that makes it much scarier and more unsettling that most shows with more violence and conventional horror trappings.  It’s tempting to say the relatively idyllic […] Read more

Well then – let the apoplexy begin. If you’re going to do a timeskip, I guess you may as well go all-out and completely blow preconceptions out of the water as Shin Sekai Yori did.  Novel readers obviously had an idea of what was coming, and some of us who […] Read more

I’m not sure if Shin Sekai Yori was in what I would call a slump – more like “slightly less great” for a couple of episodes – but it was fully back on-track for this one. Damn it, how does SSY keep making me think the episodes are 5 minutes […] Read more

The last two episodes of Shin Sekai Yori have had a “which one isn’t like all the rest?” feel to them. Someone (forgive me, I can’t recall who) suggested that the change in art style courtesy of the idiosyncratic Yamauchi Shigeasu last week was intentional, to make the near-sex scene […] Read more