Wel­come to The Cart Driver’s world renowned anime sea­son pre­view! In the post–chart­fag world, the need for sea­son pre­views to simply tell you what anime are com­ing out has been dimin­ished. Instead I’m here to tell you why these upcom­ing anime are inter­est­ing. And there are a lot of…interesting anime com­ing out this spring. Bar maybe two or three titles, I wouldn’t call this sea­son par­tic­u­larly prom­ising per say, but there’s cer­tainly a lot of anime I’m fas­cin­ated in see­ing how they’ll turn out.

The Con­tinu­ation of the Adventures

of Rider and Waver

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes

This isn’t so much a sequel as an unusu­ally long gap between epis­odes 13 and 14, but finally we get to see more Rider and Waver inter­ac­tions. And some other char­ac­ters too, who seem to hog an awful lot of screen­time con­sid­er­ing the show isn’t even about them. Look at the title; it clearly says Rider and Waver. Not the adven­tures of some stoic blonde girl in fancy armour. Not a parade of deep voiced brown haired self-important dullards. Rider and Waver. Hope­fully the anime will rec­tify this minor flaw in the second half.

Eureka Seven Ao

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

No. Same world but new char­ac­ters and new plot

People claim that series are never as good when they’re shaken down for more con­tent, which isn’t true. You only need to scroll up one space to see an example. There’s also another cur­rently air­ing example with Aquar­ion EVOL, which seems to be get­ting largely pos­it­ive reviews des­pite its pre­vi­ous sea­son appar­ently being as well received as a dead mouse down the back of your shirt. Then there’s Gun­dam, Macross, Lupin III, Ghost in the Shell (or at least, I’d argue this case). The trick here is to not mess with the work the ori­ginal achieved and try to take it in a new dir­ec­tion. Even the cur­rently air­ing Last Exile Fam I feel is approach­ing their sequel the right way, the only flaw being the mor­onic main char­ac­ter they chose to head the new series. Make the new series in such a way that it calls back to what made the ori­ginal great while also being open to new fans.

What I’m say­ing is there’s noth­ing inher­ently wrong with what Eureka Seven Ao is doing. It’s tech­nic­ally a sequel to the ori­ginal, except with an entirely new cast of char­ac­ters, which is a good thing. This means new­bies will be able to jump straight in. I was able to watch Eureka Seven without hav­ing seen the pre­vi­ous 6 Eureka series oh ho ho. Any­way, I loved the col­our­ful aes­thetic the world in Eureka Seven had, and the trailer indic­ates that thank­fully that is stay­ing. Same dir­ector of the ori­ginal too. Reas­ons to be wor­ried though prob­ably boil down to the lack of Dai Saito on the series com­pos­i­tion (script on Bebop/Champloo/GITS:SAC/Eden of the East/Ergo Proxy). Without him but while keep­ing the same dir­ector came forth the Eureka Seven movie, which was as well received as salt on a paper cut. The staff announced are all just mecha design and col­our design and anim­at­ors and so on, which is cool and all. Eureka Seven has always looked great. But without the writ­ing to back it up, it will be wasted talent.

Zetman

Zetman is based off a manga by the same dude who made Video Girl Ai, I’s, DNA² and a load of other cheesy seinen romance stuff. Which makes it even weirder that he also made what can be only described as an Amer­ican comic book style super­hero manga. Thanks to the pop­ular­ity of Tiger and Bunny, super­hero stuff is back in vogue, with spruced up bish­i­fied char­ac­ter designs. The oblig­at­ory homo­eroti­cism yaoi bait comes from, judging by the trailer, a mean rivalry with lots of shots of them star­ing angrily at each other. Also, judging by the trailer, there will be ANGST and TRAGIC PASTS and LATIN CHANTING and ATTEMPTED RAPE and MORE ANGST. It is a fairly impress­ive trailer mind you, and that’s not just because I’m highly sus­cept­ible to any­thing with latin chant­ing. What rubs me the wrong way is how Amer­ican super­hero comic book-y it is, a genre I’ve just never got­ten into. It strikes me as the kind of show you hear old guys say­ing “well I haven’t enjoyed any anime in years because it has all been moe­shit but I liked Zetman”, which may be the hint that you’re look­ing in the wrong area for your entertainment.

Ozuma

I’m not sure why pro­du­cers have sud­denly decided Leiji Mat­sumoto stuff is cool again, but here we are. A remake of Space Battle­ship Yam­ato is com­ing together in a massive series of movies. There was the live action Yam­ato from a year back. Now there’s Ozuma, with no rela­tion to any of his pre­vi­ous series (although I’m sure the female char­ac­ter designs will be as wispy as ever). It’s a 6 epis­ode thing to run every 2 weeks about some kids in some sci fi set­ting and human­ity is dying whatever syn­opses are over­rated. It’s got some real vet­er­ans on the staff, most not­ably Taka­hashi, the guy who made Votoms and a whole load of other mecha anime. Well, the real vet­eran would obvi­ously be Leiji Matsumoto.

Yeah, Mat­sumoto. It’s hard to over-estimate his influ­ence on anime. You could prob­ably count the num­ber of people more influ­en­tial than him on one hand. There’s Tezuka, Go Nagai…errmmm…that’s kind of it. Yam­ato, Cap­tain Har­lock and Galaxy Express 999 are his 3 big ones. For some­thing newer fans might have actu­ally seen, there’s that Inter­steller 5555 movie with Daft Punk. Chances are though most people read­ing this have seen next to no Mat­sumoto before, so just treat this as a totally new ambi­tious sci-fi anime where the girls have very pointy noses. Given the alarm­ing dis­ap­pear­ance of noses in mod­ern anime, this is some­thing that can only be celebrated.

Hyoka

Oh hi there KyoAni, anim­a­tion stu­dio behind K-ON, Lucky Star, Haruhi, Nichi­jou, Clan­nad, Kanon and basic­ally a whole load of moeblob anime with shock­ingly good anim­a­tion. Can’t say I’m a fan due to their adher­ence to the bible of cute, although I know plenty of oth­ers are. I was quite inter­ested in Hyoka at first because it’s adap­ted from a mys­tery novel. Plus they brought in the author of Full Metal Panic to do the series com­pos­i­tion, so I took it as a hint that maybe they’re tak­ing a few steps away from cute­ness again. Expect­a­tions took a massive dip though when I saw the char­ac­ter art and it star­ted to dawn on me what this would prob­ably be like. What was that JC Staff show from a few season’s back…God’s Memo Pad? Yeah, that’s what this reminds me of. I do won­der why they’re half-arsing their cute­ness with stuff like this or Nichi­jou. Either go full out K-ON style or make some­thing totally dif­fer­ent. Halfway between garners the interest of neither crowd. I guess it could be good, but…well, it’s KyoAni.

Saint Seiya Omega

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

No. Entirely new story and characters

Saint Seiya was a manga from the 1980’s about a bunch of pretty boys in skin tight body suits get­ting really ang­sty and punch­ing each other. As you can guess, it was a massive hit amongst female read­ers, some­thing that was rather a shock at the time, and fuelled the ang­sty skin­tight cloth­ing bishie bri­gade that dom­in­ates fujoshi fan­base ever since. What the actual story is about I have no idea, but that’s fine because Saint Seiya Omega is com­pletely uncon­nec­ted to any pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion of the fran­chise, which I’m totally cool with. As I said in my Eureka Seven Ao piece, I like it when they make a fran­chise like this open to new­comers (except when it gets over­board in the case of Gun­dam. Please stop mak­ing new Gundam).

What’s cool about Omega is they brought in the Cas­sh­ern Sins team, a highly tal­en­ted tight knit bunch. At least, I usu­ally think of them as the Cas­sh­ern Sins team, but the promo art for Omega begs the com­par­ison to another series they worked on: Heart­catch Pre­cure. It’s actu­ally a bit dis­con­cert­ing how sim­ilar they look. It’s like one of those joke epis­odes where a dude in Heart­catch becomes a Pre­cure in a dream. I know Saint Seiya has always swung towards the ladies, but…come on, that main guy’s hair is fuck­ing pink! I guess it serves as a nice con­trast to DARK AND GRITTY Zetman. Whatever, I’ll prob­ably get over the look within 5 seconds of the first episode.

Sank­area

I did my usual trick pre-season of check­ing out a chapter or two of the manga that are being adap­ted. Impres­sions upon read­ing the Sank­area manga are as fol­lows: 1) The child­hood friend char­ac­ter is called Wanko. 2) Zom­bies are appar­ently a fet­ish now. 3) It is really bad, I can only ima­gine how worse it will get with Deen adapt­ing it. 4) Her name is Wanko! I guess any­thing is on the table after we had a char­ac­ter last year called Anal.

Kur­oko no Basket

Kur­oko no Bas­ket is an adapt­a­tion of a really pop­u­lar shounen manga, run­ning since 2006. Shounen is…well, I like good shounen, but they seem to be few and far between in recent years, and it’s really dif­fi­cult to tell which will hit and which won’t since there’s an equal amount of hype from everything from the good (Blue Exor­cist) to the bad (Beezle­bub) to the offens­ively awful (Toriko). Plus I’ve been feel­ing kind of down on sports shounen since Knight in the Area proved itself to be prob­ably the bland­est anime from last sea­son. The bit of the manga for Bas­ket I checked though was sur­pris­ingly good, in a goofy shounen kind of way. It’s dif­fi­cult to tell with shounen really. Staff is tal­en­ted though, with Pro­duc­tion IG doing the anim­a­tion and a Brains Base vet­eran on the series com­pos­i­tion, although the dir­ector worked on Prince of Ten­nis so it bal­ances out. I don’t know, I’ll remain hope­ful I guess.

Space Bros

Space Bros! Mother­fuck­ing Space Bros! OK, before I go com­pletely crazy over the name, let’s be bor­ing and talk about the staff work­ing on it. Dir­ector is this dude called Ayumu Watanabe, who for years and years only worked on Dor­ae­mon. Work­ing on stuff like Dor­ae­mon or Shin-chan is kind of like the anime director’s equi­val­ent of train­ing in the moun­tains. They come down for years after nobody hear­ing of them at churn out amaz­ing work. At least, that’s the plan. Any­way, fuck­ing Space Bros! The very little I read of the manga was fant­astic, very remin­iscint of Urasawa’s 20^th Cen­tury Boys, which is about as high a praise as you can give some­thing. Speak­ing of Uras­awa, the last time a seinen anime got over 50 epis­odes was Mon­ster, but Space Bros has already been sched­uled to run for 48+, which shocked me. A non-kiddy/shounen anime air­ing for over a year? I wasn’t aware Japan made these any­more. Also man, it’s Space Bros! It’s about Bros. In Space! What’s not to like?

Hiiro no Kakera

Count the char­ac­ter arche­types in that pic­ture. There’s the ang­sty angry white haired dude who goes “tch” and turns his head away when talk­ing to any­one. There’s the shota dude who is really over-exuberant. The other effem­in­ate guy who has a dan­ger­ous heart dis­ease. Then there’s that long-haired dis­missive guy who keeps push­ing his glasses back up his face because god for­bid he buy a pair of glasses that fit his face. In case you haven’t guessed by now, this is yet another otome game adapt­a­tion about a group of samurai ninja bish­ies the main girl woos by being com­pletely inef­fec­tual. Chances are it will turn a tidy profit for Deen, because these shows always bloody do. Did you know they’re mak­ing a third sea­son, an OVA and 2 movies for Hak­u­ouki? Fuck­ing Hakuouki!

Upotte!!

This is one of those anime you make up as a joke. I know anime loves to anthro­po­morph­ise everything into cute girls, but guns? I guess Strike Witches was anthro­po­morph­ised WWII fighter planes, so guns is prob­ably a sig­ni­fic­ant step down from that and quite reas­on­able, all things con­sidered. I don’t play enough gun wank mod­ern mil­it­ary shoot­ers so for all I know an AK47 is just a spin-off group from AKB48 when B-chan left, so what interests me most is the staff. This is Xebec and their Z-Quality Team, with the dir­ector of Rio Rain­bow Gate on board. You could not get trash­ier than this.

Mys­ter­i­ous Girl­friend X

I have abso­lutely no fuck­ing idea what to expect from this. The manga is…strange. The plot descrip­tion is the title. This guy has a mys­ter­i­ous girl­friend. It seemed to me to be a com­ment­ary on how for­mu­laic rela­tion­ships are in cul­ture and how excit­ing doing some­thing dif­fer­ent can be. For example, why do we even take kiss­ing for gran­ted as some­thing couples do? I don’t know if the show can expand this single idea into a full series though. It’s being dir­ec­ted by the same guy who’s doing Space Bros, so he’s also a bit of a dark horse. Then there’s the stu­dio adapt­ing it. Hoods Enter­tain­ment, the guys who made their debut with the tit suck­ing extra­vag­anza Seikon no Quasar and then fol­lowed that up with breast mutil­a­tion anime (steal­ing from sankaku head­lines now) Manyuu Hiken­chou. Their his­tory isn’t what you’d call star stud­ded. I mean, the Mys­ter­i­ous Girl­friend X manga is sorta per­verse, but in a really bizarre sort of way that ques­tions the very notion of what is con­sidered per­verse. It might be easier to simply think of this as Nise­monogatari epis­ode 8 the anime.

Medaka Box

“Oh boy” I hear you say, “I am so look­ing for­ward to Medaka Box”. Nope, you’re not, this show will suck. “What? But it’s a manga writ­ten by Nision, guy who wrote the –monogatari series, which means it will be good”. Nope, sorry mate, but Medaka Box has routinely been towards the bot­tom of the Shounen Jump rank­ings and fre­quently gets cri­ti­cised for going abso­lutely nowhere for months upon end. The fact that it hasn’t been can­celled is some­thing of a mir­acle. “Ah but it’s being anim­ated by Gainax, I love those guys”. Wrong, all the guys that made Gainax great have left. The Evangelion/Kare Kano/FLCL crew? They’ve all left or retired by now, most of them mov­ing to Stu­dio Khara to make the Evan­gelion movies? The team that made Gur­ren Lagann and Panty and Stock­ing? Imaishi packed them all up and moved to his new anim­a­tion stu­dio Trig­ger. The per­son dir­ect­ing Medaka Box is the same per­son who dir­ec­ted He is my Mas­ter and This Ugly Yet Beau­ti­ful World. There is nobody good left at Gainax.

Accel World

I prefer Sun­rise when they make their own stuff, rather than adapt­ing light novel Shana clones. At the very least they tend to have really high qual­ity anim­a­tion, and the trailer looks very flashy, albeit flashy in a Guilty Crown sort of way. There are also no noses, because noses aren’t con­sidered moe. Ser­i­ously, this has been some­thing that has been bug­ging me increas­ingly over the years. What happened to noses at the turn of the dec­ade? Any­way, the dir­ector is the guy who did Mai HiME so knows his flashy action sequences, but also made Girl Who Leapt Through Space so he also knows how to make crap. I’ll be hon­est though, the only reason I’m really drawn to this is because the main char­ac­ter is a little chubby kid. I’m not sure why I’m drawn towards that, but with swathes of Yuji Everyleads dom­in­at­ing the world of Shana clones, some­times all you need is a fat kid in the role of Yuji to stand out from the crowd. You know what else would help you stand out from the crowd though? If you gave the char­ac­ters some fuck­ing noses!

Tsur­it­ama

Kenji Nakamura is an inter­est­ing fel­low. He dir­ec­ted a seg­ment in the Noit­am­ina anime Ayakashi that impressed the pro­du­cers enough to give the char­ac­ter in that arc his own full TV series in Noit­am­ina a year later. This anime was Mononoke, a really weird artsy piece, so it was a pretty big shock when it proved to be a huge suc­cess, both crit­ic­ally and com­mer­cially. Since then he’s been given a free reign to do pretty much any­thing he wants, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. There was the equally bizarre Trapeze, my per­sonal favour­ite of his, and last year he made [C] which was…well, it had some fas­cin­at­ing ideas and was fairly enter­tain­ing, but was also kind of a mess. I’d call him an auter except he doesn’t seem to have any single style cemen­ted, but they’re always ima­gin­itve, cre­at­ive and worth a shot.

So onto his new anime, Tsur­it­ama. First impres­sions on the trailer were a bit dis­ap­poin­ted. I remem­ber think­ing C was fairly nor­mal look­ing by Nakamura stand­ards, but Tsur­it­ama is yet another step down the path to nor­mal­ity, although com­pared to what most anime look like it’s still incred­ibly styl­ised. Rather remin­is­cent of that Toei short piece Kyouso­giga, a look I rather like. The weird­ness is mainly found in the syn­op­sis. A French­man, an Indian who mar­ries a duck, and an alien who has come to earth to do some fish­ing. I prob­ably should have left it with that final point. Arakawa Under the Bridge as dir­ec­ted by Kenji Nakamura. That’s all I needed to know.

Nat­suiro Kiseki

It’s because stuff like this is being made that I have such respect for Daily Lives of High­school Boys. An anime about 4 girls being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other, cre­ated for the sole pur­pose to pro­mote a bunch of idols. The one point of interest, and also con­fu­sion on my part, is that the dir­ector is Seiji Mizushima, the dir­ector of the ori­ginal FMA and, more recently, Un-Go. He’s a dir­ector I have a lot of respect for. Heck, he even made some­thing like Hanamaru Kinder­garten watch­able and fairly enter­tain­ing. He doesn’t have his usual posse that help him out on pro­jects though, but I’ve seen enough of his stuff by now that I’m will­ing to give any­thing with his name on a shot. Maybe this will prove to be some sort of glor­i­ous decon­struc­tion or some­thing, com­plete with more jabs at nation­al­ism and how idols are treated as tools by soci­ety hol­low­ing out their per­son­al­it­ies leav­ing empty shells of mar­ket­able traits. And hey, speak­ing of hol­low mar­ket­able idols…

AKB0048

This. An AKB48 anime. It was going to hap­pen even­tu­ally. In fact, it did hap­pen before, with the anime Pro­ject Ice, which I still class as one of, if not the worst anime I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a fair amount of bad anime in my time). For those hap­pily ignor­ant of what AKB48 are, they are kind of a big deal in Japan­ese otaku fan­dom. It’s a group of idols (the cur­rent num­ber is some­where around 57) each with their own cutesy appeal. Through some really ingeni­ous mar­ket­ing strategies, their sales blow everything else aside in the Oricon charts.

So you might think that this would be sim­ilar to the Idolm@ster anime, fol­low­ing a group of idols as they go about their idol duties, right? Nope, instead we’re going for a post apo­ca­lyptic set­ting where human­ity rebels against the oppress­ors, inspired by the under­ground idol group AKB0048. Bet­ter yet, it’s been dir­ec­ted by Shoji Kawamori, guy respons­ible for a lot of the Macross Fran­chise, includ­ing Fron­tier and Zero. Also Aquar­ion EVOL, so the guy knows how to make good dumb goofy sci-fi stuff. What I find really weird is how they’ve brought in this high pro­file dir­ector and yet have char­ac­ter designs that look really ama­teur­ish. Hon­estly, I haven’t a bloody clue what to expect from this. Con­sid­er­ing they’re based off real life idols, the char­ac­ter­isa­tion will be as shal­low as a puddle, but that’s the only thing I could bank on. The rest? Not a fuck­ing clue.

Saki: Side A

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

No. New char­ac­ters and new plot

The other side of the spec­trum to Eureka Seven Ao. Eureka Seven was fin­ished, plot wrapped up and every­one liv­ing hap­pily ever after yada yada yada. Start­ing with new char­ac­ters made per­fect sense. Saki, on the other hand, didn’t fin­ish its story. I know a lot of Saki fans wanted a proper sequel to the ori­ginal. But no, instead we get this big cast on new char­ac­ters. Seems counter-intuitive but they have brought back all the same staff, so maybe fans of the ori­ginal just have to get over them­selves and accept these new imposters. But what do I know, I didn’t like the ori­ginal either. In fact, this dir­ector is one of my least favour­ite work­ing today. Man­abu Ono and his mis­sion to elim­in­ate noses from anime alto­gether. Look at that pic­ture, what passes for noses could just as eas­ily be mis­taken for a speck of dirt on your screen. What do you have against noses you crazy man?

Sakami­chi no Appolon

This is one of those dream com­bin­a­tions that you never thought would see the light of day. Shinichiro Watanabe, dir­ector of Cow­boy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, dir­ect­ing an anime about two kids set­ting up a jazz band with Yoko Kanno doing the music. If there is a poten­tial prob­lem, it’s that it’s based off an ongo­ing manga so it won’t have the oppor­tun­ity to wrap up in time. Mind you, if your biggest prob­lem is that you’re based off an award win­ning manga, then chances are you’ll be OK. Win­ner of the Sho­jok­ukan Manga Award no less, prob­ably the biggest manga award there is. Ooh, should prob­ably add that Mutha Fookin Space Bros won that award the year before, so double the hype for that. But back to Appo­lon. It’s great to see Noit­am­ina back to host­ing high qual­ity josei anime again. It’s great to see Mr. Bebop back in the anime world after being absent for so long. If you watch any­thing this sea­son, watch Appolon.

Jor­mun­gand

Someone asked me, back when Steins;Gate was air­ing, were White Fox the new big name in the anim­a­tion stu­dio ring. I poin­ted out that White Fox were simply a jour­ney­man stu­dio, with no cohes­ive style or staff behind their works. This adapt­a­tion of Jor­mun­gand proves the point I made in that post. It’s being adap­ted by White Fox but has none of the main staff that worked on Steins;Gate or Katanagatari or Tears to Tiara, the three anime White Fox have made before. Instead of that Steins;Gate dir­ector, who was essen­tially a Mad­house vet­eran, they instead brought on board the dir­ector of Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka. Yeah. That said, as I’ve learned from Future Diary or Spice and Wolf that if you give a dir­ector qual­ity source mater­ial they will hitch up their trousers and try to prove to the world that they’re cap­able of anim­at­ing more than just shitty harem VN adaptations.

The Jor­mun­gand manga is very Black Lagoon/Hellsing –esque in that it has really angry women hold­ing guns along with this gen­eral vibe of sexy danger. I couldn’t tell you how good the manga is. I tried read­ing it but didn’t get far because I can never tell what the fuck is going on in action manga. How­ever for these kinds of stor­ies, a lot often comes down to whether you can nail the tone. Turn too far in the dir­ec­tion of sad­ism and you end up with Dead­man Won­der­land. On the plus side, the manga end­ing is coin­cid­ing with this anime adapt­a­tion, so it will at least end prop­erly. My point here is that if you’re going to hype your­self up for this, do so because of the source mater­ial. Not because you love Steins;Gate and White Fox are mak­ing Jor­mun­gand too. There is none of the same staff.

Phi Brain con­tin­ues airing

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes

Does this even count as a new sea­son if there is abso­lutely no gap between the two? I vote for no, so I’m not going to cover it. Mov­ing on–

Shin­ing Hearts

Shin­ing Hearts is Pro­duc­tion IG’s adapt­a­tion of an RPG by the same name. The game altern­ates between fight­ing mon­sters and bread bak­ing, depend­ing on your pre­ferred style of play. Kind of how like Poke­mon Ruby/Saphire allowed you to either engage in manly real battles or beauty pageants if you felt like being a humong­ous pussy. A game­play choice I appre­ci­ate but, unlike game­play, you can’t decide in a TV show that you’d prefer to watch the main char­ac­ter killing slimes instead of the ump­teenth epis­ode of hawt girls bak­ing bread and acci­dent­ally spill­ing cream on each other’s faces and watch­ing it drip slowly down their smooth skin as it dis­ap­pears into their cleav­age and speak­ing of hawt girls, the char­ac­ter designs are by God. How­ever I have learned by now that God is not a good per­son to trust when it comes to the qual­ity of upcom­ing anime. Plus this is hardly what I’d call Pro­duc­tion IG’s A-team when you’ve brought aboard the King of Aver­age, dir­ector of Rental Magica, Chrome Shelled Region and Legend of the Legendary Her­oes. So don’t expect much from this. Go and watch Fault instead.

Sen­goku Collection

If there’s one thing you’re almost guar­an­teed of every anime sea­son from now until the end of time is that there will be at least one anime per sea­son that has some­thing to do with the Sen­goku Era. Choose a ran­dom sub­title, add Sen­goku to it and there’s prob­ably an anime with that name. If you want to be super ori­ginal, why not gender­swap all the char­ac­ters too. A female Oda Nobunaga would be hil­ari­ous and totally ori­ginal! When search­ing for inform­a­tion for this, I acci­dent­ally typed in Sen­goku Para­dise instead and there’s an anime with that name too. It’s based off a ‘social game’ which for me reads like they’ve adap­ted the Japan­ese equi­val­ent of the Mafia Wars face­book game. What’s annoy­ing about this is it’s being anim­ated by Brains Base. Dam­nit Brains Base, I thought you guys were legit! Sure your stuff can be flawed, but there was always intent to pro­du­cing qual­ity con­tent. Akikan was the one blem­ish on your record. If it was going to come to this, I would have pre­ferred if you just stuck to mak­ing more bloody Natsume.

Korean Zom­bie Desk Car

of the Dead

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes

One year ago the first sea­son of Korean Zom­bie Desk Car aired. It was an incred­ibly gen­eric harem com­edy that occa­sion­ally poin­ted to itself and pro­claimed “look at me, I’m being hor­rible and gen­eric”! This caused people to mis­take it for a par­ody, only to have it later shoved in their face as the show gradu­ally for­got to even point out how gen­eric it was being and the true beast below was revealed. Now we have more, this time with ‘Of The Dead’ tacked on at the end. A mock­ery of non­sense anime titles that slap Eng­lish onto their names to sound cool? A par­ody of High­school of the Dead? Or are the cre­at­ors’ idi­ots who think ‘Of The Dead’ is a catch all term they can put onto some­thing that has zom­bies in it? Me thinks it may be the last option.

Acchi Koc­chi

The latest 4-koma adapt­a­tion! Right, let’s unearth from my base­ment Ye Olde Laws Of 4-Koma Adapt­a­tions. Rule 1: Thou must have more than one joke in your rep­er­toire. Judging by the short sample of the manga I read, Acchi Koc­chi nimbly evades this by hav­ing no jokes what­so­ever. In the final panel, where a joke usu­ally resides, the char­ac­ters simply yell some­thing and that’s the end. Rule 2: Thou must be more than cute girls doing cute things. Instant points right off the bat because there are men in this show. Rule 3: Thou must form some sort of cohes­ive nar­rat­ive. Again, signs are pos­it­ive that this will be passed. The dir­ector has pre­vi­ously dir­ec­ted Lotte’s Toy, which did have a story. It was about an 11 year old child’ need to guzzle semen and occa­sion­ally pre­ten­ded to be about par­ent­ing. As we can see, I have sci­en­tific­ally proven that Acchi Koc­chi will be the greatest anime ever, with the likes of Space Bros and Appo­lon cower­ing beneath its mas­tery of the 4-koma adaptation.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

As sig­ni­fied by the fact my favour­ite anime of both 2010 and 2011 were by Shaft, it’s prob­ably clear by now that I’ve become a Shaft fan­boy (no, Dusk Maiden of Amne­sia is not by Shaft, but bear with me I’m going some­where with this). With the massive suc­cess of Madoka and the –monogatari series, it’s become a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ Shaft’s influ­ence will start to be seen across other anime. It might be dif­fi­cult to judge exactly whether the influ­ence comes from Shaft, as it’s not like Shinbo’s style was born in a vacuum. He’s on the record say­ing that he was influ­enced by that old-hand at Mad­house Osamu Dezaki and his work on Rose of Ver­sailles, which crazy auteur Ikuhara also says he was inspired by. That’s why there are a lot of sim­ilar styl­istic ele­ments between Pen­guinDrum and the many of Shaft/Shinbo works.

If there’s a clear example of a stu­dio being influ­enced by Shaft though, it’s Sil­ver Link, for the quite obvi­ous reason that the staff there all used to work at Shaft. Thing is, the anime they’ve pro­duced have been kinda shitty. Tay­utama, C Cubed. Their best was prob­ably Baka to Test, which still wasn’t very good, run­ning out of jokes after maybe 2 epis­odes and repeat­ing itself from there on. Then again, this is largely the same prob­lem all early Shaft/Shinbo stuff had too. It wasn’t until the turn of the dec­ade did they start to pro­duce some proper storytelling cap­ab­il­it­ies within that crazy style. I think it’s safe to say that Dusk Maiden of Amne­sia won’t be their break­out hit. It’s just another Shana clone. Gen­eric male lead who has no dis­cern­able per­son­al­ity bey­ond the fact he’s kinda nice has high school girl with super powers fall into his lap. The web­site for the anime boldly greets you with a giant cleav­age. I guess there are some parts from Shaft I wish they didn’t take quite so much inspir­a­tion from…

Koi-ken

Oh boy, ’tis the sea­son for social net­work­ing games. First Sen­goku Sub­title and now Koiken. I sup­pose if they’re going to make social net­work­ing games, they might as well base them off the most well-worn clichés and genres. First Sen­goku era char­ac­ters turned into hot teen­age girls. Secondly a dat­ing sim set in high school in which, in their own words, an “extremely ordin­ary” male lead gets to talk to a series of girls. Want to date the maid? How about the shrine maiden? What about the girl who is basic­ally Azun­yan from K-ON? The options are lim­it­less! It’s going to be a web-release by an anim­a­tion stu­dio I’ve never heard of before, so look for­ward to eye-cancerous webrips and pos­sibly ter­ribad levels of banal rubbish.

Kimi to Boku Sea­son 2

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Sorta. It’s s’life but they’ll assume you know the characters

Funny how this anime’s abject fail­ure is even more stark now that Daily Lives of High­school Boys graced our screens.

Nyarlko Sea­son 2

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Sorta. It’s a goofy com­edy but they’ll assume you know the characters

Flash shit about moe-fied cthulhu. Also a sequel. The ori­ginal wasn’t very good. Yeah…that’s all I have to say.

::Edit:: Cap­tain Lol­icon Buttfuck Car­toons has informed me that the second sea­son won’t be flash shit and is in fact being anim­ated by Xebec. I guess in the grand scheme of anime stu­dios, Xebec is prob­ably the next level above flash. Look­ing for­ward to the third sea­son being anim­ated by Stu­dio Deen.

Queen’s Blade Rebellion

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

I don’t think so. It’s a sequel but it looks like it has new characters

Tit­ties! You know, after get­ting bored by Boda­cious Space Pir­ates lack of actual pir­at­ing or boda­city, that pir­ate char­ac­ter design in the trailer actu­ally looks rather appeal­ing. Maybe I’ll give this a go. It’s got com­pletely new char­ac­ters, and I’m sure I’ll pick up on the com­plex lore behind the Queens Blade mythos as it progresses.

Rock Lee no Seishun

Full-Power Ninden

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Sort of. It’s a gag story about a side char­ac­ter from Naruto

There used to be a thing for this back in the 90s. Super-deformed spin-offs of exist­ing fran­chises. This is that for Naruto, focus­ing in par­tic­u­lar on the bizarre char­ac­ter design of Rock Lee. Don’t have much to say about this, it’s mainly just a piece of fanser­vice for Naruto fans. But what’s import­ant here is that Naruto fans clearly still exist, while appar­ently every­one has stopped giv­ing a shit about Bleach. Yes, the TV show this silly little chibi Naruto spin-off is kick­ing off the air­waves is Bleach. That once shounen power­house that stood proud along­side Naruto and One Piece has been can­celled, with the manga also enter­ing its final arc. Since those days, One Piece has exploded in pop­ular­ity, Naruto has declined slightly, and Bleach seems to be regarded as a joke. It’s kind of fas­cin­at­ing to see.

Yur­u­mates

Some 4-koma adapt­a­tion about people with weirdly pro­por­tioned heads. It had 2 pre­vi­ous OVA releases, which were appar­ently well-received enough to war­rant a TV series. I think it will be one of those 5-minute epis­ode things? I’ve never heard any­one talk about the OVAs, none of the staff or anim­a­tion stu­dio ring any bells in my head, I can’t be arsed to check out the manga. Nobody is going to sub it any­way. Does any­one ser­i­ously care? Would any­one notice if I didn’t even bother includ­ing this in the preview?

Polar Bear Café

It’s an anime about a polar bear run­ning a cafe with a panda and a pen­guin. Clearly the greatest anime of the decade.

Kiddy Shows

Instead of wast­ing a load of space on each indi­vidual children’s shows that air each sea­son, I’m just going to dump them into this one cat­egory. Ginga e Kick­off is a kids show about saaww­currr that looks like it’s try­ing to cap­it­al­ise on the pop­ular­ity of Ina­zuma 11. I look for­ward to the massive fol­low­ing of creepy shota­con lov­ing fangirls. Pretty Rythem Dear My Future is a sequel to Pretty Rythem Aurora Dream, except with an entirely new cast of char­ac­ters. Try­ing to pull a Pre­cure here I see, except instead of try­ing to get little girls to buy multi-coloured plastic toys, it tries to get them to jump around on DDR machines and maybe take up ice-skating, so clearly it is bet­ter for your children’s health. One Stormy Night is a col­lab­or­a­tion between Japan­ese and Singa­por­ean anim­a­tion stu­dios about a goat and a wolf trav­el­ling across the land. It has some genu­inely tal­en­ted staff work­ing on it, such as the dir­ector of Shiki, but there’s no point look­ing for­ward to it because nobody ever subs these kinds of shows. There’s a new Jew­el­pet, a new Beyblade and a new Card­fight Van­guard, new Bak­ugan and even a new Trans­formers, just in case there weren’t enough toy advert­ise­ments in your children’s’ lives.

Movies and OVAs

Usual reminder here that the movies that are cur­rently being released in Japan are only get­ting the­at­rical releases. You won’t get to see them until much later when the BD releases are out. With that in mind, I’m going to be pre­view­ing the movies that are com­ing out on BD within the next 3 months, accord­ing to amazon.jp. Also for OVAs, I’m not going to be cov­er­ing those that are just spe­cial addi­tional epis­odes to TV series, since they’re usu­ally noth­ing more than pieces of fanser­vice. Watch them if you liked the TV series.

Recol­lec­tion of a Cer­tain Air­ship Pilot

This has been released and subbed already, but it only came out very recently and I didn’t talk about it in the last sea­son pre­view, so I’m giv­ing it a quick men­tion here any­way. This is Madhouse’s latest movie, a stu­dio with a looooong list of amaz­ing anime movies to their name. You know, every single Satoshi Kon film, every single Mamoru Hosada movie, Red­line, and that’s just in their movies cata­logue. This one doesn’t have quite the star stud­ded staff behind it, unless you think the dir­ector of Story of Sainkoku is some­thing worth leap­ing for joy over. Which is far from being a bad thing to have on your résumé, but it’s also the only thing on his résumé, unless you want to list that he was assist­ant dir­ector on Cos­pray­ers. To be fair, Cos­prays was try­ing to be bad, and he at least helped achieve that. As much as I love Mad­house, this looks rather tepid and ordin­ary by their stand­ards, which admit­tedly means it looks con­sid­er­ably more inter­est­ing than most everything else com­ing out. As I said though, it is already out and subbed, go give it a shot and make up your own mind.

Alice in the Coun­try of Hearts

Won­der­ful Won­der World

Speak­ing of movies that have already been released, this Alice movie thing has already been released in Japan for quite a while now, but no subs exist yet. Heck, I didn’t even see any raws. Not sure why nobody is jump­ing on this. There’s col­our­ful bish­ies every­where, that should be reason enough for a large pro­por­tion of the anime view­ing pop­u­la­tion to watch it, right? It’s based off a manga by the same name. From what I can tell, it’s kind of like those Sen­goku era stor­ies where all the fam­ous fig­ures turn into large breasted ladies, except in this case you replace ‘Sen­goku Era’ with ‘Alice in Won­der­land’ and replace ‘large breasted ladies’ with ‘col­our­ful bishies’.

Un-Go epis­ode 0

Un-Go was a really fas­cin­at­ing anime. Yeah about half of the epis­odes were really badly rushed thanks to Noitamina’s lim­ited epis­ode count, and the mys­ter­ies them­selves often sucked. But I still loved it because who­ever was mak­ing it really had an agenda they were try­ing to push. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anime more laden with polit­ical state­ments, even more so than Stand Alone Com­plex or Eden of the East. This ‘epis­ode 0′ is the story of how Shin­juro met Inga in the first place, back when he was a sol­dier. If I could have asked for any­thing more from Un-Go (asides from maybe cut­ting out a few of the mys­ter­ies it didn’t really need so it wouldn’t be so rushed in places) it would have been exactly this. So I’m stoked. Not sure many other people are, but for those with me the DVD/BD release is the 20^th of April.

Then there’s a bunch of fran­chise movies that don’t war­rant cov­er­ing. There’s a new Pre­cure movie, new Naruto movie and a new Prince of Ten­nis movie, the final one of which I’ll only watch if ten­nis wipes out the Klingons.

Kimi no Iru Machi

OVAs now, first with Kimi no Iru Machi. Or, as the ‘fans’ like to call it, RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE etc. The manga is by the same guy who wrote Suzuka, and from what I gather it’s largely the same stuff. Lots of char­ac­ters lik­ing each other but being vari­ous degrees of stub­born and not get­ting together and then finally get­ting together but then decid­ing they don’t like this and so on and so forth. Short OVA adapt­a­tions of ongo­ing manga gen­er­ally suck balls, but the reason I’m inter­ested in this is because the dir­ector is the same guy who dir­ec­ted Time of Eve and Pale Cocoon. Yas­uhiro Yoshiura is one of my favour­ite guys work­ing in anime today, although there’s a rather notice­able lack of any of his handheld-camera style of anim­a­tion from the trailer. But whatever, he’s got that other movie com­ing out this year. I’m guess­ing this is just a way bal­ance the books on his end.

Moe Can Change!

And finally, to round it this humong­ous post, we have the prime ter­ribad mater­ial cat­egory. It’s based off a game for Android which is, for all intens­ive pur­poses, a pretty prin­cess dress up game. You get some moeblob and stick it in vari­ous out­fits. Appar­ently this idea so was shock­ing and mind-blowing that they decided it was worth mak­ing an anime out of. Dir­ector has done Spice and Wolf, but some kind of crazy magical light­ing struck his head when he adap­ted that novel because everything else he has done has been utter trash. I can’t wait!

::EDIT:: A few days after I pos­ted this, there was that small deal of a new Lupin III TV series announced.