Started off last week with the rest of Scrapped Princess (2003), which was excellent. It has everything - an intriguing story, great characters, fascinating worldbuilding, humor, action, intrigue, drama, tragedy, redemption… And quality animation and music to boot. It was just a pleasure from start to finish.

And then, of all things, I followed it up with one that was even better, and from a somewhat unexpected quarter. Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na / Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020).

It was directed by Yuasa, which is a huge point in its favor IMO - he consistently impresses me. But at the same time, it’s an anime about anime, which is a niche genre that I find to be mostly tedious and self-absorbed, so even with Yuasa at the helm, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. But I was so, so wrong. It’s glorious, and immediately jumped high onto my all-time favorites list…

One thing is that it mostly skips past the drudgery and workaday world of making anime - the part that most series focus on, IMO to their detriment. Instead, it gets all of that out of the way right off the bat by bringing together a main cast of three who are perfectly suited for their respective roles of director, animation lead and producer, then puts them in a wonderfully run down studio with every tool they might need just sitting there waiting for them. They do of course face problems, but they’re generally more abstract, with the biggest recurring one being that they just can’t stop creating - every idea leads to another idea, every one of which they want to draw.

And that really sets the tone for the anime - what it is is a celebration - a love letter to anime, and further to imagination and creativity and the thrill and fulfillment of visualizing something and striving to communicate it, then watching as an audience gets it, with all the impact you hoped for.

And a wonderful thing about it is that all the while that the characters are coming up with ideas and animating them, trying to capture movement and mood and interesting design, the anime itself, in the background so to speak, is casually throwing in its own wonderful animations. There’s a constant stream of just little riffs scattered here and there - a transitional scene or a bit of background movement or some camera work - that are astonishing, and apparently the same thing the anime is depicting - people creating interesting imagery just for the joy of it.

And even with all of that, the characters manage to be engaging, there’s a satisfying amount of growth and it’s even laugh out loud funny. Even the OP is awesome. What more could I want?

It was almost a relief to follow that up with something… not good. If nothing else, it gave my smile muscles a chance to rest.

Duan Nao / Die Now is Chinese, and… well … it shows. It’s very derivative and tropish. The biggest problem with it though is that it introduced what could’ve been an interesting story in spite of the tropishness, and dropped all sorts of hints to apparent multiple layers of mystery… then ended. With another… oh… 30 or 40 episodes, it could’ve been good. Maybe.

So after that I was in the mood for a sure thing, so I’m watching Megumin’s KonoSuba spin-off - An Explosion on This Wonderful World (2023) and laughing my ass off.

Oh, and along the way, and uncharacteristically, I’m following not one but two different current series - Honey Lemon Soda and I May Be a Guild Receptionist, But. Honey Lemon Soda is okay - most notable so far for being pretty good in spite of being very tropish. Guild Receptionist is great though, and with the latest bit of character background, looks like it could turn out to be really special.

First, I’ve been meaning to mention that the ED is just the cutest thing I’ve seen in months, so seeing it switched to the opening was kind of neat.

Ashita no Watashi ni Sachi Are

The episode was interesting. I wasn’t sure if this was even going to have a plot of any note - with the right cast, it likely could’ve worked as gag/slice of life and I would’ve been fine with that. But it’s looking like it is going to have a plot, and it could be interesting.

And the implications of that flashback also go some way toward explaining the other theme - what had been the OP - and the reason why the two were switched. All of that imagery of what appears to be Alina as a well-established adventurer, beautiful though it is, didn’t quite fit with the notion that all she ever wanted to be was a receptionist. With what we know now though…

Perfect Day

Looking forward to the next episode.

All right - I’m sold already, just on that synopsis and the factvthat it’s an original.

Just hoping western civilization doesn’t collapse first.

Still liking this, vanilla though it might be.

This episode faltered a bit, with too many people being too kind to her all at once, which seemed unnatural and forced just for plot purposes. But I’m interested to see how the cliffhanger is going to play out.

I’m up to episode 6, so still fairly early. I have some ideas about where it might be headed (it’s certainly the case that the world that Pacifica is prophesied to poison probably doesn’t actually deserve to survive anyway), but I’m mostly just reveling in the fact that it keeps surprising me, so that’s good news.

Just got around to this one and I’m actually liking it quite a lot. It’s pretty much just stupid fun, but it’s at least a newish spin on an otherwise mostly unexplored corner of the genre, and it has some great lol moments. And I’m curious to see where it’s headed.

Started the week off with the rest of Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined), which was great - alternately goofy, cozy and surreal.

Then I had the sort of odd experience of “discovering” a director I hadn’t realized I was already a fan of - Makoto Shinkai. I just happened on Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko: Everything Flows and it was wonderful - bittersweet and heartfelt and simply beaufiful, and I liked it so much I looked up the director, and only then discovered that he had also done Suzume and 5 cm per second and Kimi no Na wa, among others. I had completely failed to notice that three of my favorite anime movies were all from the same director.

So then I went on a sort of mini binge, and watched Tenki no Ko, Kotonoha no Niwa and Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo, all of which were good, though not quite as good as his certainly not coincidentally better known ones.

Then I just sort of wandered aimlessly before ending up at Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (Dusk Maiden of Amnesia). I read the manga back in the day and remembered liking it, but didn’t remember much other than bits and pieces of the plot. It was good all in all - an odd but actually plot-relevant mix of school life, ecchi rom-com with a dash of harem and full-on Junji Ito style horror.

Then, as a change of pace, I dipped back into my own past and watched Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. It’s one of the first anime I ever owned (on VHS), and I have no idea how many times I’ve watched it over the years, but I haven’t seen it since I last owned a VCR, which has to have been… at least 15 years ago. And it was just as much fun as I remembered.

And at the moment I’m watching an intriguing oddity called Scrapped Princess. At first glance, it appears to be a sort of cheesy swords and sorcery adventure story, but it’s been revealing surprising depth as it goes along and has really been quite good. Remains to be seen how it plays out…

“Gobou.”

Somehow this is still managing to be better than it seems like it has any reason to be. I suspect that it’s just particularly well structured and presented - that there’s enough attention to detail and to the way that the story’s unfolding that it’s satisfying in spite of being kind of ordinary. Sort of like surprisingly good vanilla ice cream.

Huh… that was very cliched, but still managed to be pretty good. I’m at least curious to see if it can maintain whatever it is that’s making it better than it seems like it should be.

So first up in my meanderings through past anime last week, since no series grabbed me right off, was a movie - Sakasama no Patema (aka Patema Inverted). It was pretty good all in all. It’s a bit too ham-handedly allegorical, and the pseudoscience that provides the basis for everything doesn’t hold up to any sort of scrutiny, but it still had some interesting twists and turns, and the two main characters were charming.

Then, not really in the mood for anything specific, I happened on a current release that seemed like it could be worth a shot - I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in my Class. And I made it about halfway through the second episode and I was done. The story is painfully contrived and hackneyed, the MMC is a formless collection of tropes and the FMC is some sort of awful mega-tsundere, alternating between being pathetically weak and needy and being a miserable, pointlessly vicious bitch.

So, still not really in the mood for any specific thing, but inspired by something that could’ve at least made that last one a bit more tolerable, I ended up going to a genre that I can count on to generally provide something of interest no matter what else it might lack, and that’s ecchi. Maken-Ki! (2011) to be specific. And the one thing that can be said about it is that it knew its priorities - the ecchi is top-notch and the characters and story are basically just placeholders. It was a pleasant enough diversion all in all, though notably shallow even by ecchi school harem standards.

It also served a purpose though in that it made me crave something of substance, which led to the gem of the week - 86 (2021).

That’s been right near the top of my TBW for a couple of years now, and holy shit was it worth it. The first season was stellar, with great characters and a fascinating and compelling story - and I just devoured it (the first eight episodes in one sitting, interrupted only by the need to sleep, and the rest at the very first opportunity the next day). The only minor criticism I might have is that it could have and arguably should have ended with Lena looking to the horizon, just because that was such a powerful and meaningful moment. Yes, it would’ve been a very open ending, and there were still a lot of unanswered questions, but it would’ve been a good stopping place.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with not ending it there was illustrated in the second season (or I guess technically it’s considered the second half of a single season). There was room in there for a much larger story, and notably a story that followed both the 86 and Lena, but that would’ve required many more episodes, and presumably they just weren’t given that many. So instead it just focused on one part of it that could be squeezed into 12 episodes. It was okay, and the addition of Frederica to the cast was a good one, but it was all just a bit contrived and sort of oddly tangential to what should’ve been a much larger story.

Ah, but then the last five minutes or so of the last episode made the whole damned season worth it - that was one of the most glorious and satisfying moments I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Remains to be seen if there will be any more - I’d love to see what’s going to happen now, but I suspect that for that, I’ll have to read the LN, and I already have an overwhelming TBR list for LNs…

And finally, a bit drained from the suspense and drama of 86, I cast about for something comfy, and ended up going with one that’s been on my TBW for many years - Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (aka Humanity Has Declined). And it’s every bit as whimsical and charming as I’d hoped. It’s essentially an ongoing manzai routine, with the aptly named Watashi serving as a notably wry and low-key tsukkomi to an entire race of bokes, and it’s wonderful.

Decided to give this one a shot, so I watched the first episode, plus about half of this one, and that was all I could take.

It’s all paint-by-numbers - the setup is silly and forced, he’s an empty shell to whom cliches are assigned as needed by whatever tropish scene is currently playing out, and she’s just pointlessly awful.

I’m pleased and not a little relieved.

And yeah - it’s a shame that there almost certainly won’t be more and that we got so little detail.

From the references in episode 2, it seems that they can travel more or less freely between the worlds, and were in the process of returning to Terminal when they got snowbound. I would assume that the original plan was to reveal some more details about Terminal and Albert, and likely some more of their own history, then shift back to our world for more interactions, and so on, and all the while maintaining that episodic structure.

If done well, it could’ve been pretty much the ultimate expression of iyashikei, since the specific thing that happens - the way in which Escha and Chron help people - is simply by seeing the value in them and in what they’re doing, and that’s apparently something that they’re not only especially well-suited for, since that value stands in such sharp contrast to Terminal, but something that actually materially benefits them and Terminal as well.

But oh well…

Lots and lots of them…

Some that come to mind:

Mushishi - it just doesn’t hold my attention, which is actually sort of okay, since it’s episodic, but means that it lingers as TBW. I’m up to episode 5 ATM.

Tatami Galaxy - I generally love Yuasa, but I just keep bouncing off of this one. Mostly it’s that it’s an odd sort of “tell, don’t show” spin on storytelling, and the narration is not only so constant, but so fast, and it’s just sort of exhausting.

Haibane Renmei - It’s strange enough and slow-paced enough that I’m going to have to be in exactly the right mood to appreciate it.

The later seasons of DanMachi - When I first watched the series, there were three seasons out, but by the time I made it through season 2, I was exhausted. The villains are just so villainous and so immensely powerful and Bell is so earnest and slow to grasp the real nature of things that it was both suspenseful and frustrating, and I just couldn’t work up the initiative to dive into season 3. And I still haven’t, and have since fallen even further behind. But someday…

The later seasons of Re:Zero - the first time through, I made it most of the way through season 1, and just hated Subaru so much I had to walk away. Then I learned that that was a not uncommon reaction, and saw lots of claims that you just have to stick with it, so I went back and watched the rest of season 1, and ended up still hating Subaru. It’s not just that he’s so often weak - I can understand that. It’s that the only way he seems to be able to counter that weakness is to jump all the way over to being a self-absorbed asshole who doesn’t listen to anyone. There’s a middle ground there where he’d listen to people and take their advice and make considered decisions and carry through with them, but he skips right past that, so he basically alternates between being a weak and foolish asshole and being a self-absorbed and willful asshole. But I love the concept and most of the rest of the cast (and especially Emilia), and I can’t imagine that Subaru keeps failing to find that middle ground through so many successful seasons, so I keep wanting to give it another chance.

Sort of, but not really.

She’s desperately insecure, inexperienced and naive, and surprisingly sweet, and the whole narcissistic school idol thing is a front that’s going to come crashing down.

First up last week was the rest of season 2 of Non Non Biyori - Non Non Biyori Repeat. It was fine - not quite as good as season 1 IMO, but still fine. And I still like the manga better.

Next I cast about for something loud and frenetic as a complete change of pace, and boy did I find it. Dead Leaves (2004) It’s gloriously cel-shaded non-stop action. I could pull a lifetime’s supply of desktop wallpapers from its 50 minute runtime, and I have no doubt that it provided at least partial inspiration for a number of later works - most notably Kill La Kill and Redline. It has a semblance of a plot, but mostly it’s just an art design orgy.

Still in the mood for something unusual but looking for more plot, I gave a long-time resident of my TBW a shot Sonny Boy (2021). I only made it three episodes before I had to walk away. It’s an interesting premise (though famously already done by Drifting Classroom), but it has a flaw that particularly bothers me - aside from the three main characters and one other notable side character, every single character in it is an asshole of one sort or another. They aren’t even terribly plot-relevant assholes or assholes moving toward a redemption arc - they’re just assholes, for no particular reason other than to provide conflict.

So I went looking for something else and ended up clicking on MF Ghost. I didn’t even know it existed until relatively recently, and I didn’t expect a whole lot from it, but I liked Initial D back in the day and I’m a sucker for racing anime in general, so I had to do it. And I just started with the beginning of season 1 and binged it all the way through to the end of season 2.

It was fine all in all, but sort of odd. The animation is much, much better than Initial D, and the basic setup is different, but it somehow managed to follow pretty much the exact same formula, all the way down to the vague but earnest and unaccountably pretty MMC, his gonk best friend, constant droning commentary going into excruciating detail about cars and racing, lots of teeth-gritting declarations of a racer’s pride and recurring cries of “but my car is a 6.2 liter v10 with 900 horsepower, so he shouldn’t be able to beat me!” as the challengers inevitably get beaten. It was just the mindless entertainment I expected it to be, though at the pace the story is unfolding, it seems like it’s going to take at least a dozen seasons to really get anywhere, which is a bit off-putting.

Then I went back and finished Sonny Boy, which was okay all in all. More than anything else, most of the assholes were moved out of the story and the focus narrowed to the main characters who on their own were actually fairly compelling. The end was sort of vague and handwavey, but it was okay.

Then, to cap off the week, I went in search of something completely different and happened on a gem And @wjs018@ani.social - take note - you should go watch this ASAP. I guarantee you’ll love it. And anyone else with a liking for fluffy post-apocalyptic slice of life should check it out.

Escha Chron

It’s listed as an OVA, but I’m near certain that what it actually is is a planned full season anime that was inexplicably cancelled while still in production, so they just released the existing two episodes on their own. It only really hints at the background story, just as if more was set to be revealed in later episodes, but then there were no later episodes. So what we got was two helpings of episodic iyashikei/slice of life, sort of reminiscent of Mushishi, with a dash of a Girls Last Tour sort of background (the difference being that the girls are time travelers and the stories are set in our era, with a few flashbacks to their previous and apparently post-apocalyptic life). And it’s sweet and charming and soothing, and well worth seeing, and it’s a shame there wasn’t more.

And I don’t really know what’s next, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to delve into my TBW.

Ah.

Well, at least it wasn’t the cynical attempt to establish a franchise that I took it to be. It really felt to me like the entire point of that season in the long run was simply to create a demand for season 2.

I might have to look into the LN, because I liked the story well enough until I figured out that we weren’t getting any sort of resolution of anything, and the petty contrarian in me kicked in.

Nothing in this coming season catches my attention.

So, first up last week was the KonoSuba movie, Legend of Crimson. And it was every bit as awesome as wjs18 led me to expect it to be.

Lots of great moments, but my favorite had to be Komekko completely stealing Kazuma’s spotlight, then unveiling her own Crimson Demon chuuni-style intro. I’m even laughing right now, remembering it.

Next up was an oddity: VTuber Nandaga Haishin Kiri Wasuretara Densetsu ni Natteta (aka VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream). My little brother’s a bit of a weeb too, so we spend much of holidays sharing interesting things we’ve seen/played since the last time we talked, and that was one of the ones he mentioned. It was better than it seems like it should have any reason to be - not high art by any means, but not a cynical cash grab either, which is what I would’ve expected. I know nothing at all about vtuber culture, so that was all lost on me, but it was enjoyable enough anyway.

Followed that up with another he mentioned Nozomanu Fushi no Boukensha (The Unwanted Undead Adventurer). It was really quite good all in all, and then completely fell apart in the end when it was revealed that it wasn’t really an anime season in any meaningful sense, but was pretty much just a 12 episode prologue. Nothing at all was resolved - it spent all of that time, and all it managed to do was establish the setting and what presumably is meant to be the main cast and some of the background, and it was cynically obviously done just to serve as a foundation for a hoped-for franchise. There’s apparently a season 2 coming, but I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. I liked it well enough, but to be honest, the cynicism of so blatantly trying to create a franchise with the only possible payoff relegated to the future rather than telling a story with its own payoff pisses me off.

And at the moment, I’m finally watching the second season of Non Non Biyori - Non Non Biyori Repeat.

I have a complex history with NNB. At the time the first series came out, the manga was my absolute favorite, no competition, and it still ranks as one of my all-time favorites. And the anime was certainly gorgeous, and it has a couple of stellar episodes (the New Years episode with Candy Store and Renge is on the short list for my all-time favorite anime episodes period), but I was still disappointed all in all - it just never quite caught the magic of the manga. So when the second season came out, I was interested, but I just couldn’t quite get myself to watch it - I didn’t want to be disappointed again. But it is NNB, and its reputation is even better than the first season’s so… I was going to end up watching it sooner or later. And now’s the time.

And so far, so good. It’s sort of odd that it’s essentially a reboot, but I’m hoping that that’ll be to its advantage, since a lot of what disappointed me with the first season was seeing inferior versions of great gags from the manga, and this one has only touched on a couple of those moments in passing and is mostly telling other parts of the story. We’ll see.

Mm… yes and no.

Yes - the animation style is sort of simplistic and imprecise, and that’s presumably a deliberate stylistic choice.

But I was talking about season 2 specifically, which goes beyond that, and is notably different from the rest of the series.

Yeah - the movie’s next up on my list. At the moment, I’m wading through season 5 of Star Trek Lower Decks.

The thing with season 2 of KonoSuba - in retrospect, I can’t even quite pin down what made it so much better than season 1. There were some notable bits (like the introduction of Yunyun, who makes me laugh pretty much without fail), but really it seems that it’s just that every part of it was kicked up a notch. Or at least everything other than the embarrassingly awful animation, but I stopped noticing that for the most part.

And yeah - the Monogataris. At some point, I’m going to watch Nekomonogatari Kuro, since it’s a prequel and fills in the part of the story that’s repeatedly flashed back to in Bakemonogatari, and then I suspect I’ll be done with the series. I don’t really dislike it - it’s just sort of tedious and pointless.

Since I’m not watching anything this season and instead browsing through the past:

First up last week was Ore wo Suki nano wa Omae dake ka yo (2019), which was… not good. At all. It was sort of promising at first - the initial setup was intriguing if a bit derivative - but it fell flat almost immediately and never recovered. The biggest problem - I don’t know if it traces back to the LN or was just part of the adaptation - is that the writer(s) appear to have understood the idea that it’s good to have characters who grow and change, but didn’t get the bit about the changes having context and following a recognizable progression. So what we get are characters who are seemingly arbitrarily assigned traits, then at some later point, they’re essentially arbitrarily assigned different traits.

Next was Nisemonogatari (2012), which was… kind of dull really. It’s all the same gimmicks as Bakemonogatari, but at this point, they’re wearing a bit thin for me. And try as I might, I just detest Senjougahara.

Then came a surprising gem - season 2 of KonoSuba (2017). I liked season 1 well enough, but it just didn’t quite come together entirely for me. And season 2 didn’t look promising, since the first thing I noticed was that it has just about the worst art I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was done cheap and fast by amateurs. But then I discovered (the surprising bit) that pretty much every other aspect of the season was stellar - great stories, great characterization (most notably, they took the edge off of Kazuma’s assholery - in the first season there were too many times when it was unwarranted and too extreme, but in the second season, it was better timed and proportioned), and more genuine laugh out loud moments. And both the opening and closing themes are terrific.

And finally, after bouncing off of a few things, I ended up rewatching Akudama Drive (2020). The first time through I was initially intrigued but not particularly impressed, then slowly came to enjoy it more and more and was very impressed by the end. I wanted to see if it held up to a rewatch though, since I wasn’t sure if it was genuinely that good or if I was just swayed by the contrast between my initial reaction and expectations and what it turned out to be. And I’d say it really is genuinely that good. It’s not flawless by any means - it has some plot holes and some notably forced bits, but all in all, it just really is very good. And Swindler - the main character - is plain awesome.