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

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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

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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

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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 20th 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 20th 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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

I made my top 30 anime post about 2 years ago. However, as I watched more anime, more started to enter the list, which inevitably caused others to drop out. Instead of losing what I wrote about them forever, I created a ‘those who just missed out’ page, devoted to holding those that got kicked out of the top 30 in favour of newer, shinier stuff. But that list was starting to show its age itself. I was starting to watch anime that were not quite good enough to make my top 30, but better than those that had since dropped out. So to finally give those anime the credit they deserve, I decided the best method was to simply extend the top 30 further. So now you have this: 31–60.

60: Dominion Tank Police

There was a trend in the late 80’s and early 90’s of OVAs about a police force fighting cyborgs in a smoggy megacity set permanently during the night. Most of them are fairly forgettable, but Dominion Tank Police stands far above the rest. The adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga has an edge to it that makes it memorable. From the wild raunchy humour to the incredibly well-developed world setting, its biggest surprise is that it manages to combine both this goofy light-hearted tone while tackling some deep themes of searching for meaning in your existence. Oh, and it has anti-tank penis mines.

59: Future Diary

Future Diary operates on its own brand of unique logic. It states that if there is a story beat it needs to get to, all other logic barriers are considered irrelevant. Hence we get ‘Future Diary Logic’, in that completely fucked up crazy shit happens, but you roll with it because it doesn’t really matter in the overall scheme of things or the characterisation. And that’s a large part of the reason why it shines. In focusing on what makes these characters tick with this unrelenting action pacing, it continues to thrill episode after episode. Well OK, there are some rather dumb episodes in the middle, but the overall experience is a pretty thrilling one indeed.

Related posts: I blogged the show.

58: One Outs

One Outs is technically about baseball and how one mysterious American pitcher propelled a struggling Japanese baseball team to greater heights. What it’s actually about is Tokuchi Toua, the chain-smoking anorexic spawn of satan, mentally assaulting various muscled men until the collapse at his feet. Tokuchi carries this anime like no other. It’s his put-downs, his mental calculations, his terrifying stare, that keep you riveted throughout. It does have some pacing problems, and does lack any real depth, but makes up for it with Tokuchi fucking Toua.

57: Dennou Coil

There’s a little fallacy in anime fandom that fillers are bad. Episodes that don’t advance the plot and serve only as contained stories are inherently bad thing. There is no greater example of how wrong this can be than Dennou Coil. Honestly speaking, I didn’t care much for the plot nor the characters, the world they inhabit is such an imaginative and well-invented place that I loved any episode that explored the possibilities in contained. This meant that the best episodes were the ones that acted as stand alones. Nuclear warfare beards. Pleiso the shadow serpent. The giant fish that ate the town. It really does have possibly the best realised settings in anime.

56: Tatami Galaxy

While I’m not quite as big on this as many of my fellow Yuasa-philes (screw you guys, Kaiba is better), Tatami Galaxy is still an incredibly clever story. Like Groundhog Day meets Honey and Clover, it’s the way it plays with its formula that makes it so good. The juxtaposition of each plot element with each episode, shedding new light on the incident each time, made for an incredibly rewarding experience. Sure it has more unnecessary animation quirks than anything even Shaft/Shinbo have put out, but it’s witty, sharp and has such a brilliantly constructed story that its positives far outweigh the negatives.

55: Trapeze

Speaking of auteur anime directors, let’s move from Yuasa to the equally bizarre Kenji Nakamura and his incredibly strange Trapeze (or Kuuchuu Buranko if we feel like weeabooing for a bit). The story is about crazy psychiatrist and his solutions to dealing with various patients in a trippy environment where anything that isn’t polka dot is shunned for disgracing its family. Not all the crazy animation techniques work, such as the live action faces, but it’s how all these episodic heart-warming stories come together into this great overall picture that make it special. Try it if you really want something different.

54: Jellyfish Princess

Three Noitamina anime in a row, but while the last two were artsy stuff that anime hipsters cite as their favourites, Jellyfish Princess is josei at its goofiest. Following the story of a bunch of hopeless female shut-ins, devoting their lives to some of the strangest otakudoms, from trains to old men, it’s about how one particular jellyfish otaku finally grew out of her shell and started to do something worthwhile with her life. But what really stands out is how well-directed the comedy is. It has the brilliant way of timing events that makes what should be otherwise fairly standard comedy stuff become utterly hilarious material.

53: Seto no Hanayome

Seto no Hanayome sounds awful on paper. Generic teenage boy gets saved from drowning by a mermaid and, according to mermaid law, he now has to marry her. It’s when you realise they are actually the mermaid mafia that the real heart of this series comes out: A ball to the wall bonkers comedy. Some of the jokes don’t work, but it fires off so many and doesn’t linger on any that it’s tolerable, and some of the jokes are inspired in how they defy your expectations. A husband and son try to sneak away some mermaid porn, only to realise it’s just a video of a fish flopping about a bit. Our mermaid idol bursts into a lullaby song, only for it to be a ridiculous off-tune parade of la-lee-ho’s. It’s not a particularly clever anime, but damn is it ever funny.

52: Casshern Sins

Madhouse are probably my favourite animation studio, because no other studio is willing to attempt the stuff they do. Robot Hunter Casshern was originally a generic superhero anime about a cyborg dude Casshern and his pet robot dog. Casshern Sins, on the other hand, is a post-apocalyptic depression fest in which our titular character wanders around a desolate landscape with his fabulous 70’s hairdo, meeting various people in states of disarray and generally doing a lot of angsting. What makes it special is how each episodic story surrounding these characters has a ray of hope to each of them. Highly ambitious and experimental, while also being a touch narm-y at times, it’s an anime that has a remarkable amount to say, and one that I’ve grown to appreciate more over time.

51: Crest of the Stars

While all of the Banner of the Stars series are good too, the original is the best constructed of the lot, and the only one that remains completely focused on the true core that makes this series special. The story of how Jinto and Lafiel grow from merely travel companions to having to rely on each other when thrust into various life-threatening scenarios. What makes it stand above its peers is how well crafted it all is. It has a level of depth to the science-fiction world that rivals Star Trek, and actually uses this information to build up a more interesting relationship between the two lead characters rather than just for technobabble (OK, there’s a bit of pointless technobabble, but not much). For two such reserved personalities, Jinto and Lafiel stand above their peers as one of the best duos in anime due to how real their feelings and interactions feel.

50: Spice and Wolf

Speaking of fascination character duos, Spice and Wolf is Crest of the Stars except set in medieval Europe and with more sex appeal. While Jinto and Lafiel are reserved, Horo and Lawrence have this brilliant flirtatious back and forth, as though they’re trying to find the most roundabout way of getting the other to confess their feelings, complimenting each other without the other person realising it. It makes for endlessly entertaining banter, only occasionally broken up by obligatory plot and economics chat. The economics stuff isn’t bad, but it does feel like you sit through them just to give better settings for Horo and Lawrence to start flirting again. Oh, and if loving Horo makes me a furry, then I shall yiff along with the worst of them, but she truly is walking sex.

49: Gintama

Gintama is to anime what Simpson is to American television. A satire of a popular genre (Simpsons it’s the family sitcom, Gintama it’s shounen) that occasionally devolves into the very thing it’s supposed to be satirising, but when it doesn’t, it manages to be incredibly funny. Rife with mocking parody, probably their greatest strengths is how they managed to remain funny for so many episodes. I’ve only seen 100-odd episodes of Gintama, so maybe it too like the Simpsons starts to lose its comedic edge, but from what I’ve heard from those 250 episodes in, it’s still as funny as ever. I should probably catch up sometime…

48: Bunny Drop

I hate using words ‘charming’ and ‘lovely’ to describe anything, because it implies that the piece in question is so concerned with being sickly sweet that it has no bite to its message, which is absolutely not the case with Bunny Drop. The story is about parenting and how difficult and yet rewarding the experience is, tackling subjects from single parents to the difficulty in earning money to properly raise the child. It managed to single-handedly change my entire perspective on parenting, and it does all this while being, yes, charming. And maybe lovely too.

Related Posts: Why Bunny Drop made me rethink my opinion on parenting.

47: Roujin Z

I’m a massive fan of Katsuhiro Otomo. He has this wonderfully cynical, dark sense of humour, bringing out some of the best black comedy in anime (a medium not particularly known for its black comedy). He wrote the script for Roujin Z, a story about how an old man in his containment facility/caretaking machine goes berserk, prompting a massive military operation to try take it down. It brings together some great themes of the dehumanisation of senior citizens and the importance of human interaction, all in this incredibly entertaining piece. It’s an unsung gem that’s much more accessible and fun than my description could possibly give it credit for.

46: Haibane Remnei

I feel a bit mean sometimes for not rating Haibane Remnei higher than I do, because it really is a flawless piece. It has this wonderful old-fairy tale vibe to it. Not in the Disney sense, but in the Brothers Grimm way, in that the strange yet slightly frightening fantastic elements come together in this almost ethereal package. One of the things I loved about Haibane Remnei was there was this massive world out there to explore, parts of which were slowly told throughout the story, but we were only concerned with this small human story surrounding these two characters. I guess it didn’t quite give me the same thrill I want from my favourites, but for what it’s trying to do, it really is perfect.

45: Time of Eve

Time of Eve is like one of those indie movies that do incredibly well on the movie festival circuits, throwing away modern conventions with a unique take on camerawork and dialogue delivery with some off-beat humour while still delivering ultimately the same story that makes it connect with people. It has this wonderful flow to it all. The lines run into each other and the swooping camera angles give this effect that there’s so much going on at once that you are only catching snippets of these characters lives. It made me a permanent fan of Yasuhiro Yoshiura and Studio Rikka and I can’t wait to see more from them.

44: Bakemonogatari

What’s funny about the amount of critical acclaim Bakemonogatari (and its sequel, Nisemonogatari) gets is that it’s ultimately a wish-fulfilment fanservicy harem, complete with girls falling for the main character because he’s a Nice Guy, and a camera that is on near permanent perv-mode. But the artwork is so pretty, the dialogue so sharp and cutting, the characters so well-developed and hilarious, the story so carefully woven into these flirt-fests, that you come away massively entertained by the whole shebang. It may be artsy smut, but it’s incredibly cleverly written artsy smut.

Related Posts: I blogged its not-quite-as-good sequel Nisemonogatari.

43: Lupin III Castle of Cagliostro

Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro is the only Lupin III piece I have really loved. Not necessarily because they tampered with the formula or anything. Yes, Lupin is more good-natured and the tone more whimsical than some of the darker, edgier Lupin stuff. But what makes this one work is how fantastic the directing is. Every element comes together with perfect timing, the cues with the music swinging perfectly in rhythm with the characters actions. Some of the best scenes in the movie are when the characters are just dicking about on rooftops. It’s such a hugely entertaining film, it’s only downside being no Lupin property after this will love up to it.

42: Steins;Gate

One half sci-fi mystery, one half ball-busting time travel thriller, Steins;Gate was the anime that forced me to change my opinion that everything that came out of Visual Novel land that wasn’t either porn or melodramatic crap. The story builds up to certain key moments, cranking up the tension with each episode, while never losing the sense of humour at its core. And then there’s Okarin. Possibly the greatest main character in anime, his grandstanding and desire to be this great Mad Scientist drove this show, turning his whole world upside down, breaking him and eventually building up a man who became his own persona. El. Psy. Congroo

Related Posts: Blogged every episode.

41: Hellsing

Not Hellsing Ultimate, that OVA that did away with the devilish style and character charm that characterised what I love about Hellsing and replaced it with sadism and overkill. No, this is that 2001 much-maligned Gonzo version of Hellsing, where the story just sort of drops off. But I love it regardless because it has a style like no other. This sort of dangerous suave charm, complete with some brilliantly strange relationships between the characters. From respected fear to controlled awe, between Alucard and Integra and Victoria, there was so much unsaid yet left implied that made it work.

40: Pale Cocoon

As far as short movies go, Pale Cocoon is the best. No, shut up, I don’t want to hear. Pale Cocoon is better than that. It was the second short movie Yasuhiro Yoshiura made, after Aquatic Language, and told this amazing story about a civilisation that had given up hope, all while focusing on no more than 2 key characters. The ending revelation stands up there as the greatest single shot I’ve ever seen in anime. Yasuhiro went on after this to make Time of Eve, an improved version of Aquatic Language. If his new movie, Sakasama no Patema, is supposed to be the improved version of Pale Cocoon, then holy shit will it be something special.

39: Redline

Redline is an experience. It has a rather stark lack of depth, and the plot is nothing special, but it does have this incredible attention to detail with each little character and element. Each touch tells a story about each of these characters. Little asides that give this picture of a much larger world this character inhabits. You get the feeling that there’s a story behind each little scratch on JP’s car. That is what I love about Redline. Well that, and the fact that it’s a thrilling, exhilarating journey through thumping soundtracks, massive explosions and swearing aliens.

Related Posts: A written review and a video review

38: Durarara

If you’ve been reading this post, instead of just glancing down to confirm the anime, you’d notice a few reoccurring trends. I like a suave style, a cast of characters with much larger stories than is told in the anime, and a focused story that centres on human emotions rather than grand plot elements. Durarara is all of that, to the point that you almost want to hate it for its own self-confidence, sashaying through character developments and plot twists, so assured of its own charm that you can’t help but be drawn along with it. It’s a shame that the arc they ended the first season on (and there WILL be a second season) was the poorest, because at its core, this is such a damn fine anime.

Related Posts: Probably the most fun I’ve had episodically covering an anime.

37: Kino’s Journey

Kino’s Journey is like Aesop’s Fables: The Anime. Each town and story that Kino visits and explores doesn’t make much sense on a surface, logical level. It’s the story beneath the surface meaning that’s important. How, through his probing questions and standoff approach, Kino draws out the thought process and belief system that created such a bizarre scenario as the one he had just visited. It’s one of those series you keep coming back to, realising how sharp it truly was, and how much of it applies to real-life serious issues. It’s unique in that sense; I’ve never seen anything else come even close to achieving what it did.

36: Nodame Cantabile

This is another one of those series that get by almost entirely on the strength of its main duo. What’s unique here is they work fantastically on their lonesome too. Chiaki is the uptight, devilishly handsome workaholic, whose harsh put-downs and persnickity attitude (always wanted to use that word) make him a hugely entertaining character in his own right. When paired together with the air-headed, dopey ball of moody energy that is Nodame, the two combine to create the ultimate entertainment pair. Gyabo!

35: Moyashimon

Moyashimon’s bizarre and eccentric characters and take on college life is, counterintuitively, probably one of the most accurate takes on how strange a small college life experience can be. The world is filled with young adults with attempting to create alcohol in their rooms, transgendered people trying to find themselves, covering themselves in dirt and grease for the sake of science. Oh, and bacteria floating around in the shapes of cutesy inch-high creature. Well OK, maybe that last point isn’t quite so realistic.

34: Arrietty

Ghibli have a few aspects to their movies that repeatedly bug me, but most of the time it comes down to how their magical worlds become too strained under the weight of what they’re trying to achieve and turn to deus ex machina and barmy town. Arrietty avoids this by keeping the focus tight and letting the directing, as good as Ghibli’s directing has ever been, tell the story. By doing this, it allows its magical elements and woven themes to shine all the brighter for it. What’s encouraging is that this was a directorial debut for Hiromasa Yonebayashi, proving that Ghibli has the talent behind it to survive beyond the days of Miyazaki.

33: Daily Lives of Highschool Boys

I hate those permanently in the present, bunch of cute girls being insufferably nice to each other anime. I hate pretentious idealistic highschool romcoms cloaked in nostalgia as characters narrate their dull fucking lives and comment on the weather. I thought Daily Lives of Highschool Boys would be that. In fact, it turned out to be exact opposite, satirising the very thing I thought it was going to be. For that reason, it was a godsend. Anime needed this. I needed this.

Related Posts: Why the satire in Nichibros is special.

32: Detroit Metal City

Detroit Metal City single-handedly ruined all music for me. Not just heavy metal music, with its tearing back of the jokes surrounding the desire to appear edgy and dangerous, but also in its mockery of other music types. The fallacy behind cheesy love songs. The ridiculousness of the myths told by over-enthusiastic fans. In one single stroke, I cannot take any music personas seriously anymore. I’m not sure whether to love it or hate it for that.

31: Porco Rosso

My favourite Ghibli movie, it does many of the same things that made Arrietty work. Porco Rosso is strangely down-to-earth, with very human characters and desires, telling a neatly compacted story that hints at a much more beyond what was told in this snippet. In a way, it’s a lesson in restraint. The lack on fantastical elements means that the one scene where they do embrace the magical, it’s made all the more memorable because of its brevity. That scene with the planes flying out of the clouds, leaving Porco behind. No other scene in any other Ghibli movie made quite the impact that shot did.

Continue to 30–1

A Grade

Still nothing

B Grade

B+ Un-Go

Episodes 8–11

Looking back at Un-Go, I can see exactly what it was trying to do with each of the mysteries. They were all tying into this overall story about how nationalist governments during and post war censor for the good of the people. It usually flourished when it was allowed more space for the mystery of the episode to breath, as the final few episodes did. It would have been better if either it had more episodes, or simply had been more focused on 3–4 mysteries rather than trying to cram a whole story into a single episode. But ultimately, Un-go actually succeeded in delivering its story, where other ambitious Noitamina anime like No.6 and [C] didn’t quite manage. Fantastic series, highly recommended, although it might be worth skipping to episodes 3 and 4 first, then going back to 1 and 2.

B Persona 4

Episodes 9–12

Persona 4 is incredibly unrefined. The animation is shockingly awful at times, and some of the dialogue comes off as stilted and unnatural. But I really like what it’s trying to do. That surreal scene where Narukami slipped into a dream where all his friends left him, leaving his stats totally bare in the midway eyecatch, leaving you slightly confused as to whether they had simply edited the episode incorrectly. Or how about Teddy’s grand revelation of his desire to search for a non-existent purpose and meaning to his life, with his life apparently now meaning chatting up middle-aged women in department stores. I wish Persona 4 had the polish of the likes of Last Exile or Guilty Crown, because I much prefer the stuff it’s doing.

B Future Diary

Episodes 9–12

Again Future Diary flip flops its week between bombastically amazing to kinda stupid, although at least this week the stupid episodes weren’t quite so bad. Thankfully any episode is helped by my increasing fascination with Yuno. Her emotions switch as frequently as the quality shifts in Future Diary, and I love picking out the points when she flips sides. Plus the other characters continue to shine, each of them being unique in their own ways, yet all having similar driving forces behind their ideals that caused them to end up in this game. Like Persona 4, it lacks the polish of many of its peers, but makes up for it with great characterisation and the occasional bit of clever directing.

B Fate/Zero

Episodes 10–13

OK fine Fate/Zero. I’ll give you a B this month. I still find almost every conversation that doesn’t directly involve Rider to be incredibly dull because of their insistence with keeping their emotions hidden, but there was easily enough Rider action to keep me happy this month. Particularly his battle of ideals over wine with Saber and Gilgamesh and resulting stampede of heroes against Assassin, that was quite the sight. But probably the reason Fate/Zero is elevated this month is there was a non-Rider segment that was actually good. The ‘filler’ episode with Rin was effective tense horror, because it went against the usual Fate/Zero train and focused on a character who was incredibly weak, which made her encounters far more tense. It almost made me want to see what happens to her when she got older, but then I remembered I didn’t want to sit through either that overly wordy bullshit visual novel nor the laughably badly directed anime adaptation.

B– Lupin III Blood Seal ~Eternal Mermaid~

Eternal Mermaid was clearly trying to capture the feeling of Cagliostro again. You could tell by animation style and character designs, although the resulting look came off looking more like Fractale. Not a bad look, I have to stress, and I think I prefer whimsical Lupin to mysterious Lupin anyway. Unlike many others who watched this, I actually liked the teenage girl sidekick. She was ballsy and energetic without being irritating because she didn’t screech her demands like many of her pretenders. Plot wasn’t up to much, but since when was the plot in Lupin ever up to much. It was still a fun movie and all, but it’s not a good sign that, when I went to write this paragraph, I realised I couldn’t remember a single bloody thing that happened. Again, if you’ve never watched Lupin before, just stick to Cagliostro. But if you want more Lupin after that, this is definitely one of the stronger ones I’ve seen.

C Grade

C+ Mawaru PenguinDrum

Episodes 21–24

I honestly enjoyed episodes 21–23 this month, because it felt like it was tying the plot threads together and bringing everything to a satisfying conclusion. The concurrent plot threads of Sanetoshi and fighting fate, Ringo’s desire to be her own person and no longer strive to be Momoka, Kanba’s fight against Himari’s fate. It was all finally coming together. Which is why the final episode being a load of nonsensical metaphor bullshit had even more of a downer effect on me. I saw it coming. Off course it was coming. Ikuhara does this. But in its final moments, PenguinDrum totally lost sight of the tangible story and delved into a world of metaphor that completely baffled me. Still enjoyed the show overall, but that was not a good ending.

C+ Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing

Episodes 8–11

Whoever is in charge of writing this new version of Last Exile isn’t very clever. Sure it has a sheen to it that Persona 4 or Future Diary don’t have. This leads to the scenes where they leave the visuals to be the spectacle being the best of the series. Episode 8 was utterly fantastic stuff. But the downtime moments between characters are just not good. This is mainly down to Fam being about as interesting as a piece of paper, and with about as much depth too. You can’t develop these stupid genki characters because the show already assumes that this juvenile idiotic energy is a Good Thing. Then there’s the latest political developments which serve a rather nice contrast to Un-Go. Un-Go treated nationalism with care, looking at what sacrifices occur as a result of this mindset. In Last Exile Fam? Our country is becoming part of a commonwealth to prevent further fighting? Clearly this is a bad thing, and we shall demonstrate this by making the empire kill everyone. OK, I’m letting my personal beliefs sway my feelings towards a series, but it’s hardly handled in the most intelligent manner.

C– Invasion Squid Girl

Episodes 9–12

Squid Girl makes the exact same mistake it made last season by deciding the best way to wrap things up was to include a completely out-of-place melodrama scene in an anime that is usually a comedy so light you could use it as a floatation device. At least it didn’t pretend it was going to develop Squid Girls story before pulling a pathetic Deus Ex Machina like last season did, but it doesn’t change how bad the episode was. Sure, I got my laughs out of Squid Girl, but it’s such inconsequential fluff that I’m not sure if I can be bothered watching anymore if they make another season. Even the mini-squid girl segments are starting to lose their charm.

C– Hunter X Hunter

Episodes 10–13

I did quite like the arc where the characters faced off the convicts in the dungeon. That was a battle based off a battle of wits, competing with knowledge we already knew, which made them actually interesting to watch. But strip that back for a second, after 13 episodes I still don’t care about any of the characters. I don’t care about the plot, nor the world they inhabit. It has yet to get me emotionally invested in any way, shape or form, and if they haven’t done that in 13 episodes, I don’t really see how they can do it at all. If Hunter X Hunter dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t even notice it went.

D Grade

D Toradora OVA

Sometimes when these extra episodes to anime get released a few years after their original airing run, watching them can suddenly challenge what I originally thought about the series. I remember when Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody was released for the second season of Haruhi and being shocked at how clever and well-directed it was (although we all know what happened after that). I was never big on Toradora when it originally aired, even though I watched it through to the end, but maybe a new episode could challenge my opinion, forcing me to re-evaluate the series? Short answer: No, it didn’t.

E Grade

E Guilty Crown

Episode 8

Something finally snapped in me after this episode. Why was I giving Guilty Crown the time of day? This was brainless, shallow, soulless crap, yet somehow I was still here after 8 episodes. Why am I still here? Guilty Crown is like a spoiled child. It’s only doing this so you pay it attention. If we stop, it will just go away. Stop watching Guilty Crown guys. Please? For me? You will be much happier for it, trust me on this.

F Grade

2011 was a fairly good year for anime, especially compared to 2010. There was actually strength in depth, rather than a few stand outs hiding a mountain of crap. Instead of doing some stupid award ceremony, giving awards to anime like Guilty Crown just because they had really good animation, I’m simply going to list my top 10 favourite anime of the year.

Some quick criteria:

• Most of the anime must have aired in that year. While I’m fine with including mostly completed anime, like Cross Game and FMA:B in 2009, I’ve learned from my mistake when I included Xam’d in my 2008 anime of the year list when it was only halfway completed. So no Future Diary, Persona 4, Last Exile Fam or Fate/Zero (Fate/Zero doesn’t have 2 seasons, it just has an unusually long wait between episodes 13 and 14).
• This list also includes OVAs and Movies that had general DVD/BD release in Japan in 2011, bar Redline because I already gave that its dues in 2010

10: Kamisama Dolls

I was going to give this award to Tiger and Bunny, but changed my mind at the last minute because conforming to popular opinion is for pussies (although my top 5 will instantly mark me out as a conformist pussy but shut up). I liked Kamisama Dolls a lot. Yes the animation was awful, and yes it had an incredibly immature approach to sex appeal, but I still liked it because of how each character was just a touch insane. They were all trying to escape from their hometown and live normal lives where there wouldn’t be any rape and murder, but kept getting drawn back in due to dated traditions, stuck up old farts and their own inability to control their feelings. Realistically Kamisama Dolls only made the top 10 because most of my favourite anime from the Autumn season had the audacity to air for more than 3 months, but it Aki and co. still hold a little space in my heart.

9: Fireball Charming

While not quite as good as the first season, Fireball Charming was still an absolute gem in the world of animated shorts. The CG is so fantastic that it doesn’t even dawn on you to call it CG animation. Drossel and Gedechtanis still make for a hilarious double act, each of them apparently skipping several lines in their script sheets, leaving you to work out what on earth that apparently non-sequitur response was supposed to mean. The world building is rather shockingly good for something that’s just a weird comedy, flowing perfectly with the dialogue. It’s a fantastic little series and if you somehow have not listened to me and haven’t watched it yet, take a good hard look at what you are doing with your life.

8: Children Who Chase Lost Voices

from Deep Below

I’m still shocked at how much I ended up enjoying this. I spent my time gnawing at my own arm during Makoto Shinkai’s other movies to try get something interesting to happen. Thankfully he tossed that stupid story aside when he made Children..(although kept his strange fascination with clouds). He clearly went for a Ghibli feel with this movie, and actually succeeded, sometimes even surpassing many of Ghibli’s attempts. It manages to create a properly flawed female lead and a villain who is actually sympathetic. The magical world they travel to is an amazing sight. The themes of loneliness and accepting death are woven incredibly well into the story. It’s a very uneven movie, but the strengths far outweigh the flaws.

7: You Are Umasou Movie

Far and away the biggest shock of the year. I thought it would just be some dopey kids movie, but what I got instead was a fantastic tale of a dinosaur and his little friend Umasou. The animation was lacking, being mainly big solid colours, and it’s certainly not the most sophisticated, but it made up for it with its heart. The story is both heartwarming and heart wrenching, in a way that actually deals with proper emotions rather than cheap nakige inspired bullshit (hi thar Ano Hana fans). It’s the anime that I got the most emotionally invested in this year, and it managed this by using big goofy looking dinosaurs. That alone deserves some kind of award.

6: Un-Go

When it didn’t get things right, Un-Go was confusing and irritating, solving its mystery plotlines before I even got a chance to get to grips with what was even at stake. But when it got things right, it was mature, witty, clever, DEEP without being pretentious, and utterly brilliant. Don’t come here if you want a mystery anime, for that’s not what Un-Go’s main focus is. It’s about a post war society in which censorship for the sake of public security has gone into overdrive. It’s a fascinating study of how nationalism can contort a nations’ ideals all while focusing on a small cast of memorable characters. Really looking forward to that prequel movie now.

5: Mawaru PenguinDrum

It may have taken him 14 years before he made another anime, but it’s safe to say that there’s no chance of Ikuhara become more sane. PenguinDrum is a bizarrely brilliant piece, happily embracing the absurd in its story and running with it. Where pregnant frog potions can become important plot devices, child crushing machines are both metaphors for child abandonment and actual real machines, and a trio of penguins follow the main characters around with apparently no effect on the main story. Sure it has problems, not least the nonsense bullshit ending, but it’s such a memorable and unique experience that there’s no way I couldn’t include it amongst the top anime of the year.

4: Bunny Drop

It’s rather fitting how in a year when Noitamina starting producing otaku pandering bullshit with loser teenage male leads having magical girls fall into their lives, the best anime produced for that timeslot this season was a back to basic josei manga adaptation with Bunny Drop. This is the real pains but also the real rewards of parenting. Not some sort of magical power bestowed upon you by hours of nappy changing. A change in ideals and what you consider important in your life. The pursuit of happiness is no longer attached to how many drinks you can chug before you die, but now attached to the happiness of your child. It depicts this all in a limited timeframe through various characters, giving us a complete view of the picture. It does peter out a bit, but what we got was still fantastic.

3: Steins;Gate

One half sci-fi mystery, the second half a ball-busting thriller, Steins;Gate was the VN adaptation this year that convinced me that there was some stories of worth in that fetid mire of a medium. The characters were entertaining and well-rounded. The directing was magnificent, giving the setting this grey-filtered feel of oppression as though they really were living in a dystopian society even though they were just living in the moe-infested Akihabara (which sounds like a pretty horrific dystopia to me har har obvious joke). Most of all though, it had Okarin. El Psy Congroo. He carried this show with his charisma and his ego. One of the greatest anime characters of all time, he should be held up as an example to other anime in how much a great main character can do to improve your story over Yuji Everylead the Bland.

2: Arrietty

Technically came out first in 2010, but the DVD/BD release was in 2011 which is when everyone got a chance to see it, and that’s when I got a chance to see it in the cinema. Arrietty is fantastic. By keeping the story much simpler, it allowed for it to shine in the other areas it was much better at. The directing was a masterclass, especially the opening borrowing sequence with Arrietty and her dad. A simple story meant that it didn’t turn nonsensical at the end and the obligatory Ghibli environmental message was worked surprisingly well into the story with grace and clever subtlety. Porco Rosse is still my favourite Ghibli, but this Arrietty comes a close second. Fantastic movie, really do try to check it out.

And finally, my #1 choice, which shouldn’t be of any surprise to anyone.

1: Rio ~Rainbow Gate~

OK I’m joking.

The real #1

1: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Shaft/Shinbo used to be a combination that produced crazy visuals for the sake of crazy visuals, rarely having much to do with the story. But around the turn of the decade with Natsu no Arashi and Arakawa Under the Bridge, they finally toned down their crazy animation techniques and made what was left enhance what was actually going on. Madoka Magica was them back to craziest levels of animation combined with their newfound ability to make this animation style relevant. It’s the anime I had been wanting them to make for years, one that only gets better the more I think about it. Madoka Magica is Shaft’s masterpiece and it’s far and away my favourite anime of 2011.

Bunny Drop is about parenting — Yeah yeah I know - No really, it’s about the rewards and joys of parenting — Yeah I heard you the first time — Seriously, it’s about how parenting takes over your life yet you don’t mind because of how important it is to you — Yup , still got it, don’t have to keep repeating yourself — Get this into your head, it’s about PARENTING!

…oh, right.

That bizarre opening paragraph does actually mean something. You see, I knew Bunny Drop was about parenting from episode 1. But somehow this message didn’t truly drill itself into my brain until episode 7. Up until that episode, Bunny Drop felt like it was just repeating stuff I already knew. The struggles of having to raise a child and the rewards it brings you. That raising children was challenging, but kids are adowabubble so it’s OK. If anything, it’s a mark of my immaturity that it took so long for the real message to get into my thick skull.

Episode 7 followed Daikichi’s sister as she ran away from home with her child to stay at his house. She was getting sick of living with her in-laws and her husband didn’t come across as being particularly understanding. Their marriage wasn’t particularly happy to say the least. She relayed this information to Daikichi (who basically did nothing other than sit around and be useless) but simply being able to voice these feelings of hers was a great relief. So, the next day, her husband came to pick her and their daughter off at Daikichi’s house. She bid him farewell, saying she would ride through this for the sake of her daughter.

I was in shock. She was going to stay in a failing marriage? Live under the constant watch of her in-laws for the sake of sticking to traditional family values in helping her daughter? It was then that the message finally struck. She was staying because the rewards of parenting and raising her daughter far outweighed any problems she was having elsewhere. It was genuinely that important to her, and somehow the true extent to which people were willing to go for parenting hadn’t quite hit me yet. She was willing to give up her life for the sake of her daughter. In the same way that Daikichi gave up his single life of boozing and chillaxing, dropping down pay rungs in work for the sake of his adopted daughter, she was willing to give up her home life for the sake of her daughter.

That episode of Bunny Drop shook everything I had thought previously about parenting. To be honest, I’m still not sure I agree with it. The other characters in the show should be ample example of how single parent life can still raise a perfectly good child. But the very fact it challenged the entire way I thought about parenting, forcing me to reassess how important it really was to those involved, made it far and away one of the most important episodes of anime I watched this year.

Un-Go’s first two episodes were infuriating. You could see that, behind the mystery of the episodes and the characters, there was a fascinating post-war society evolving where censorship had taken root in some of the strangest fashions. But the scenarios through which this backdrop was set were horribly paced episodic mysteries. A murder takes place before we can get to grips with what the stakes are. Characters spout their reasoning behind events before we know who they are. The mystery is solved by the end of the episode without us even getting to grips with who was even killed in the first place. Un-Go made me feel stupid because I couldn’t follow what was going on. Thankfully some kind of mind-reading device scanned the globe and the creators of Un-Go realised their folly in time for the third and fourth episodes, where they thankfully split the mystery over two episodes. The results were astounding.

Without spoiling too much, the episode revolved around the murder of a famous android creator and his son, who wore a weird mask over his face at all times. The mysteries in Un-Go are never specifically a whodunnit type, but understanding why these things took place and how they fit into this post war conservative society. But not letting us understand what the stakes of the mystery are divorces us from the subsequent reasoning behind the case in the first place. Episode 3 nails the mystery perfectly, allowing us to suspect almost every single one of the limited suspects in turn, before blindsiding with the actual suspect in the final moments. I read a bunch of other people thought the mystery was obvious from the start. Congratulations for you clever clogs out there whose massive brains can’t be challenged by such simple mysteries. Why don’t you go star on Phi Brain if your brain is finding such difficulty being intellectually stimulated.

But the true genius was in episode 4 where they explored the reasoning behind the case. So many different themes were tackled in the space of such a small air time. What is humanity, where and who should you show this compassion to, should society give people the opportunity to carry out their darkest of desires if it harms nobody (a topic particularly relevant to certain sections of anime fandom). It does all this without coming off as pretentious, showing different characters views of the situation and tying it all brilliantly in with the story of the episode and of the series as a whole. It’s also remarkable how an anime with so much dialogue follows the ‘show, don’t tell’ motto with far greater skill than many others. So many times during that episode did little things clunk together in my mind. How did the tiny panda doll learn to be so skilled at sexual acts? Why does the child android look so similar to his daughter?

Un-Go’s double episode sprang me from a depression of what Noitamina was apparently turning into. The maturity of its presentation and of its tackling of sexual subjects was in stark contrast to the juvenile Guilty Crown. By themselves, episodes 3 and 4 could be spliced together to create a single introductory episode for anybody who wants see what this show is like. Episode 4 in particular stands out as one of the best episodes of anime I’d seen all year. Do watch these two episodes, even if you weren’t at all impressed by the first episode. It’s well worth your time.

Noitamina has only been around since 2005, so it’s not like it’s a massive stretch to include them all. The only Noitamina anime I haven’t seen are Antique Bakery, Tale of Genji, Hataraki Man, Ayakashi and Hakaba Kitaro. Anyway, to answer the actual question, my favourite Noitamina anime is Eden of the East. Yeah, the movies don’t live up to the series, but it’s still one of the most thrilling and entertaining anime I’ve ever seen. It was also the anime that made me pay attention to the Noitamina timeslot in the first place. Other than Eden, my favourites from Noitamina are Moyashimon, Nodame Cantabile, Jellyfish Princess and Bunny Drop.

Here is where I admit I’m such a humongous weeaboo that I don’t watch any TV drama. I watch comedians, whether in panels or stand up, or I watch sports. However I did catch a couple of episodes of an American TV show called Pushing Daisies a few years ago. Apparently the show was cancelled, but I loved the mad style it had. That’s something I think could be improved in animated form if the animators really went all out with the wacko style it already had in live action form.

Casshern Sins instead of Michiko to Hatchin. Twas the Autumn of 2008 and one young blogger, who had dubbed himself Scamp, had gotten himself all excited for the Next Cowboy Bebop/Samurai Champloo. But then came Michiko to Hatchin and it was a barrel of frustration and disappointment. I wish I’d covered Casshern Sins instead. Each episode had a story to tell that wore it’s intentions and meanings in a very clear fashion so there was always something new to talk about. Also, because of how seriously it took itself, there was a lot to make fun of. Well, mainly the CASSHERN KUROSE’s. I enjoyed that show a lot and I really would have enjoyed covering it.

Yup. My idea of a happy relationship is now one who can sing the Pokemon theme song along with me.

Tough, because my opinion changes over time depending on what series the person is covering or what their newfound subject of interest is. For now, I guess my top 5 would be Ogiue Maniax, Unmei Kaihen, Mecha Guignol, 2-D Teleidoscope and Star Crossed. Just look at the blogroll though if you want all the ones I’m currently enjoying reading.

Besides from the Studio Rikka 24 episode sci-fi series? I’d like to see Brains Base staff that do Baccano/Durarara/Natsume/Jellyfish Princess do an anime original production. Some kind of deathly serious psychological horror that quotes philosephers and can be interpreted in a bizillion different ways. Since most of his works so far have been fun, I’d like to see him spreading his wings and trying out something with a darker tone.

Read this, this and this. If you plan on starting a blog, wordpress.com is definitely the best way to go if you don’t know the first thing about building websites. It’s free and relatively easy to work out how to post stuff. There are other free blogging sites, like Blogger or Livejournal, but I’ve used all 3 and I think wordpress is far and away the best of the lot. The only problem is you’ll be stuck on the same handful of decent blog layouts that everyone has, but that’s just tough shit. You’re getting it for free. Hosting costs a lot of money.

Griffith from Berserk. Why he broke the way he did and what it was that caused him to act in such an irrational manner. That segment from the anime is one of the most fascinating pieces of character development I have ever seen, but what made it so fascinating is how none of it was ever mentioned by the characters themselves. We had to piece everything together ourselves. I really need to write a proper Berserk post one day. All I ever managed was this stupidly gushing fanboy post.

HELLO EVERYNYAN!

No, but that one episode did play over and over again in my nightmares. Does that count as watching a full season?

Including these two questions together because the first part can be essentially be put as “do you liked Redline”? Redline is all style. It does has the capability to tell stories, but these stories are only sent to further increase the style of the show rather than add anything resembling depth. Heck, Redline doesn’t even attempt to add depth, even poking fun at any audience member who might have tried to do otherwise. But the style is the substance. That’s sort of the point of Redline. It’s also the point of a few other anime, like Panty and Stocking. So the question is a bit of a misnomer.

Also, I’ve watched Redline 3 times. Twice in the cinema, once pirated. Still love it.

Part of the point of Madoka was that it showed what would truly happen if a girl gave up her life for a wish to become a magical girl. Same way Evangelion showed what would really happen if a wimpy teenage boy was put in charge of piloting a giant robot with the responsibility to defending humanity on his shoulders. In that sense, Madoka needs the magical girl part to work. Although I suppose you could twist the story to be about idol singers or something. Sell your soul to the studio, they hollow out your talent and market it. You live a year or two of dreams before being cast aside once your use is no longer needed.

There’s a big fucking difference between animation and manga/comics (if I’m understanding you right by sequential art). Animation has more in common with live action directing than manga, what with music and timing and direction and what not. The static form of a comic/manga cannot hope to achieve what an actual moving, talking picture can do. The diplomatic me would say that there are aspects each one does better than the other, but I’m no diplomat. Anime > Manga. It can move. It can make sounds. It can do stuff like timing. It gives the creators more control, rather than the consumption method being left to the whims of the consumer. People who prefer manga and books over moving pictures are stubborn who want to consume the material in their own preferred method rather than handing over the reigns to the creators.

Mass generalisation there, but whatever.

A bit too obsessed to the point that they put themselves in one of those car crushing machines so they too resemble a 2D person? Yeah, that’s a pretty worrying level of obsession there.

I have had dreams involving Holo, C.C. and Sheryl Nome but I’d prefer to keep those dreams to myself.

I don’t dislike manga. I just prefer anime. Same with books vs live action stuff. There’s just so much more you can do with the moving form than a static page. So recommending me manhwa is kinda redundant. Recommend me some movies though. I’ve been trying to plough my way through them recently.

One thing I’ve found interesting about shotacon is how much of it is aimed towards men. Take the infamous anime example of Boku no Pico. It’s drawn by a hentai artist who normally draws male aimed stuff. I guess a lolicon is more attracted to the nubile cuteness of young people than any feminine properties. It’s only once you hit puberty does any difference between the genders really become apparent. Before then, girls and boys are fairly indistinguishable, so I guess to a lolicon it doesn’t really matter. I’m not an expert on the porn side of otaku fandom though, so you’re better off asking someone else about this subject.

Sci-fi crossed with the Powah of Love!

No rape stories please. More the case in shojo and BL stuff rather than seinen, so it doesn’t effect what romance anime I watch. But seriously. No rapey stuff.

Woah woah calm down there. So far all White Fox have made are Steins;Gate, Tears to Tiara and Katanagatari. Tears to Tiara is a thoroughly generic fantasy series, but it was their first series so I’ll let that slide. I think Katanagatari is a pile of poop, but lots of people like it. Then there’s Steins;Gate, which is proving to be incredibly popular. Good start there, but the directorial and writing staff in White Fox are a bunch of journeymen. It’s not like Shaft or Gainax or Brains Base where it’s the same core group of people working on their projects. None of the main folk who worked on Katanagatari is now working on Steins;Gate, and again none of them worked on Tears to Tiara. It’s a studio of journeymen with no underlying similarity. Maybe with the money Steins;Gate is raking in, they’ll try to stick together to see if lightning strikes twice, but for now they barely count as an animation studio.

You do know I will probably die if I watched Aria? Or is that why you’re asking me to watch it? Well, you did say please, so I guess I have no choice. But if I mysteriously stop updating sometime next week, you know who to blame.

Well I’m currently writing this while on the toilet, so I hope I’ll have upgraded my position in a few years from now. But if I’m willing to keep writing while taking a dump, that shows my devotion to blogging, so clearly The Cart Driver will still exist many years from now.

I’m as much of a fan of video games as I am of movies. That is, I don’t make any particular effort to keep up with what’s coming out. I take an interest and I like to watch/play them quite a lot but not nearly as much as I’d like to. I’ve never owned a current generation console. I had a Sega Megadrive (Genesis for you Mericaw folk out there) while all the cool kids were getting Playstations. I only got an Xbox after the 360 was out for a few years. My laptop is incapable of playing games less than 6 years old, and even then it can still sometimes complain. So I take the ‘several years behind’ approach to gaming. As for genre, I don’t think I play enough to have decided what I like or don’t like. My favourite games range from Portal to Pokemon to Sims to Halo to Might and Magic to Command and Conquer and so on. Probably the game I’ve sunk the most time into and gotten the most emotionally invested in is Football Manager, but I’m not sure I’d call that my favourite. Just worryingly addictive.

Second part: I have a post prepared on that, so look out for it in the future.

The girls are hot.

1) Because I hold the door open for people.

2) Yes. They provided the funds for this blog when I started it up, although I’ve had to fund it myself from then on.

3) I was originally pretty dismissive of cosplay, but I’ve since warmed up to the idea. Never done it though, although I do have some ideas of what I’d dress up as. I’m tall and thin, with a physique like an Irish noodle. I have fairly close proportions to a typical Clamp character design. So if I was going to cosplay, I’d like to do something Geass. Maybe Suzaku in either is royal robes or his Lancelot skintight armour (kyaa~).

They write a blog about anime, it’s still being updated, and I know it exists. Not particularly difficult. If you’re on anime nano, then I know it exists. It’s not like I run some sort of screening so only blogs that pass my strict quality check can pass. Although if I had my way, any blog with centre aligned text would be automatically disqualified.

I have. I put in on my college application form. All 5 colleges I sent it to accepted me, so I guess it worked. Or at least, it didn’t put them off.

It’s characterisation is poorly done because the motivations of the characters are obscured to the point that I can’t follow their train of thought, leaving their actions to appear irrational. The plot isn’t great either when the reason why No.6 is an evil totalitarian city is because, as revealed in episode 8, they’re an evil totalirarian city. Great explanation there guys.

Also it’s gay.

Well not Chibitalia anyway.

There’s a difference between the soundtrack in-show and listening to it outside of the anime itself. Especially in the case of techno music. The BGM in both Eureka Seven and Redline are some of the best I’ve ever heard, but listening to them outside of the show itself is a bore. On the other hand, I think the soundtrack to Shigofumi is amazing, but it’s really not used well in the show itself. Best overall would probably be Cowboy Bebop, as boring an answer as that is.

Because Scamp is a common username and is normally taken when I try to register somewhere. 5camp, on the other hand, is almost never taken. But please, never pronounce my name as ‘Five Camp’.

The guy in my profile picture is the main character from Legend of Black Heaven. You know, that anime I’ve been banging on about for the past 6–8 months. Ring a bell?

Also, I’m just back from holiday, so I’m behind on a lot of the anime I’m watching this season. This is also why this monthly roundup is a day late. As for movies, I saw Redline and Mardock Scramble before they were popular because I’m a hipster like that.

A Grade

A– Bunny Drop

Episodes 5–8

Last year’s token josei title was Jellyfish Princess, which I’ll admit was slightly more My Kind Of Anime than Bunny Drop is. It was wild and wacky but had a good story using that strangeness it had. Bunny Drop is more down to earth, but is far better controlled and powerful. It’s challenged the way I think about marriage and parenting. Often it will suggest stuff I don’t agree with, but the very fact it made me seriously question several things is quite an achievement in of itself. Plus, it does all this without getting pretentious or preachy and, most importantly of all, remaining fun. Not as fun as Jellyfish Princess, but enough to keep a grin plastered across my face the entire episode.

B Grade

B+ Steins;Gate

Episodes 18–22

From the stupid Rukako episode to the frightening Moeka episode, Steins;Gate hasn’t exactly had the most even of months in terms of quality. That said, I love the direction the show is taking with Okarin’s character. The more his mind breaks, the less we can trust him and the more uncomfortable it becomes to watch him. His development over the course of the series has been the piece that makes Steins;Gate special. The time travel plot, the witty lines. They’re all welcome. But it’s Okarin who makes this series. I’m tempted to call him my all-time favourite anime protagonist. Only two episodes left, I hope they wrap this up properly.

B Mawaru PenguinDrum

Episodes 5–7

I’m going to be an insufferably prat and compare and contrast PenguinDrum to Utena again. PenguinDrum is more fun than Utena on a surface level. It’s funnier with wackier set pieces and less of the irritating side some of the repetition and incomprehensible parts of Utena had. The key difference is I’m just letting everything in PenguinDrum wash over me, while in Utena I’d try to decode every single scene. Not necessarily a bad thing, since trying to decode Utena more often than not just left me a headache, but it does mean I’m failing to see the point of the plot in PenguinDrum so far. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun. But I do hope this Ringo story actually goes somewhere.

B Tiger and Bunny

Episodes 19–22

Well this is a first. Normally a Tiger and Bunny monthly roundup have all the positives counterbalanced by negatives. But this month, Tiger and Bunny performed remarkably well. The plot has reached a crescendo, tackling the main issues of the story. It’s given Bunny personality once again, while focusing on Tiger and his relationship with his daughter. It’s a satisfying climax so far to what has been a fairly enjoyable series. In fact, I don’t think I have anything negative to say. Well OK, I have one. Kaede showing up and just happening to know how to reset everyone’s memories because she just happened to meet the villain was a touch on the convenient side. I guess that means I’m contractually obligated to hate on it now.

B– Natsume Yuujinchou San

Episodes 5–9

I really enjoyed the plot heavy double episode of Natsume this month. The problem with the series at the moment is Natsume’s main story of settling in with a family and friends he loves has kind of been solved. He has a family who cares for him and whom he cares for. He now has friends whom he can trust. There’s nothing more they can do with that storyline. I like the usual formula of yokai terrorises someone or some place, but all they really are is very lonely and it takes their interaction with Natsume to realise that. But there’s only so often you can repeat any story before it starts to get old. It’s the Hell Girl problem. I’d like to see the story focus on Natsume challenging the exorcists on the issue of treating yokai like they have feelings, because that would mean his learning about yokai in all those previous episodes would lead to some sort of satisfying conclusion.

B– Kamisama Dolls

Episodes 5–9

I’ll admit I give Kamisama Dolls a far easier run than I know it should get. It sure tries to make itself un-enjoyable, what with all the jarring jerks in tone, the derpy animation, and the random introduction of a new character 3 episodes from the end. But I can’t help myself, I just love the story here. I love how each character is just that touch mentally unstable. How they’re all trying to escape their past and the village to live their own version of their lives, whether this be connecting with your lost sibling, living a normal student life, or simply trying to follow incredibly vague advice in the case of Aki. You can even count me amongst the handful who thought episode 7 was amazing. Or maybe that was just me being shocked that they didn’t ruin the deathly serious tone of that episode with more unnecessary fanservice.

B– Blue Exorcist

Episodes 16–18

So apparently the manga caught up with what was going to be the current arc of the manga and decided that it would be best to ignore that arc altogether and create anime original material from here on in. Hence, in a move as predictable as the sun rising, the manga fans started complaining. But you know, manga fans [le sigh]. Anyway, I’m liking the direction it’s taking. We’re finally going somewhere with Rin’s character and moving what had until now been a nearly standstill plot in a proper direction. I am 2 episodes behind, so maybe the story grounds to a standstill yet again (next episode preview made it look like it might) but I’m holding out for some sort of proper anime original conclusion here.

C Grade

C+ Hanasaku Iroha

Episodes 19–22

I do like Hanasaku Iroha vastly more than most series of it’s type. I’ve pointed out the aspects I like in each of these monthly roundups so far. The self-aware comedic side. Ohana’s mum. The hot character designs. But there’s one aspect that has been constantly holding this show back: The drama. It’s overwrought and rather stupid but, most importantly, I Don’t Care. I really could not give a fuck who takes over the inn. Nor could I give a fuck about the love triangle between Minko, Tohru and Ohana. The only times the drama actually worked was when Ohana’s mum was involved, in the first episode and during the Ohana to Tokyo arc. At all other times, it just comes off as a bad shojo.

C– No.6

Episodes 5–7

I’m not quite sure where it was No.6 lost me this month. Partly because it likes to smash the viewer over the head with its symbolism to the point that the characters literally stop what they are doing and monologue for the sole purpose of being obtuse about what’s going on in the story. I fail to see the point of Dog Keeper’s large portions of screentime, who mainly spends that time being very angry about nothing in particular. Nezumi has this same problem, which I know is sort of the point, but I can’t follow either of their thought processes. This is partly because the show steadfastly refuses to tell us what his beef with No.6 is, but it’s mainly because I can’t understand what their relationships with each character is. I can’t work out what Nezumi thinks about Dogkeeper, what his relationship with Shion really is, even what Shion thinks of these characters. The segments with Safu come as a relief because she’s the only character blunt and gormless enough that I can follow her train of thought. I guess it all boils down to the show being too obtuse with too little surface enjoyment for me to care to work out what is actually going on. Also it’s gay.

D Grade

D Kaiji Season 2

Episodes 18–20

What has been the point of these past few episodes? Nothing has happened! Nothing at all! I know Kaiji is so slow paced it makes Bleach look like a Harrier Jet, but there’s a difference between slow paced and nothing whatsoever. No Kaiji, I do not care about this shitty villain you’ve hastily concocted a backstory for. It didn’t tell us anything we needed to know about his character to give the battle between Kaiji and the bog extra weight. Also, the battle against the bog is dull. At least the card games had a semblance of tactics I could pour myself into. This is just watching a load of balls. Boring boring boring month, kinda lost interest in watching it to the end too. I will probably keep watching, but unless the Bog turns into a giant robot, I’m labelling this arc a disaster.

E Grade

Zawa zawa zawa

F Grade

This upcoming anime season sucks compared to my ridiculously high standards.

The only ones I’m looking forward to is this adaptation of a manga I’m reading that isn’t finished yet so I’ll complain about the adaptation having an original ending, and a sequel.

Is it my imagination, or has every season been getting worse since I started to become aware of every title coming out instead of the single stand-outs each year?

Copypaste this into every forum whenever you see someone complaining about the latest anime season being rubbish. Once you’ve done that, come back here for a less pessimistic and more in-depth surveillance of the upcoming season.

Chihayafuru

Madhouse have had their reputation dragged through the dirt recently. As if the Madhouse X Marvel fiasco wasn’t bad enough, their failure to create something worthwhile from Chaos;Head has been compounded by the quality White Fox have achieved with Steins;Gate (even though the chief director on Steins;Gate is a Madhouse veteran, but whatever). With that tumultuous period out of the way, here comes their latest anime about children playing card games AARRGHHH OK not quite. Chihayafuru is a josei manga about a classic Japanese card game where you match cards to poems. I read a bit of the manga and it feels less josei and more a girlier version of Hikaru no Go, which isn’t really a bad thing. They’ve brought aboard the director of Nana and Chobits aboard, so I’m quite looking forward to this. It’s nice to see Good Madhouse return.

Tamayura ~Hitotose~

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There was an OVA of Tamayura a few months ago and I avoided it like it was the latest issue of Bestiality Monthly. This is director Junichi Sato, guy who did Aria, trying to replicate that feeling of ~healing~ anime, involving a bunch of girls being insufferably nice to each other while doing fuck all. I would probably die if I tried watching this, but good for you guys who like ~healing~ anime. Your only problem is Junichi Sato is directing a few anime this season, so a giant robot/mutant space creature/something fucking interesting might accidentally slip under his radar and into Tamayura.

Last Exile

Fam: The Silver Wing

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Do I need to have seen the previous season?

No. This is going to be set in the same world but with different characters and new story

If I am to believe my own Top 30, the original Last Exile is my 12th favourite anime of all time. So obviously this paragraph should be nothing more than incoherent fanboying at the prospect of a new season, right? Well, not quite. You see, one of the best things about Last Exile was how complete it was. It covered every character, every aspect of the world, and explored the adventure from little kid with big dreams to world changing hero. There was nothing that needed to be added. Gonzo returning to Last Exile strikes me more of a studio desperately scrounging through their backlog to find something of theirs that is guaranteed to turn a profit. Now this obviously isn’t entirely true, otherwise they’d just stick to pumping out Strike Witches iterations over and over. They brought back most of the original staff, and I have faith that those guys wouldn’t return to Last Exile without having a good story to tell us. The trailer looks good too, capturing the fantastical adventurous element to the original I liked so much. Well, it did, until that generic J-Pop song started playing. I know people like Maaya Sakamoto and the prospect of her warbling fills you with so much glee that your ears start melting, but the original Last Exile opening song is one of my favourite of all time. To have that replaced with generic upbeat J-Pop is so… *le sigh* I’m just being nitpicky. I’ll remain upbeat about this new iteration for now. Cautious, but hopeful.

Phi Brain: God’s Puzzle

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When I checked the Phi Brain ANN page, I was shocked to discover how much the original concept creator, Hajime Yatate, had done. Every from Cowboy Bebop to Code Geass to Mobile Suit Gundam to Votoms to Infinite Ryvius to Mai Hime to Escaflowne to…and then it finally dawned on me that Hajime Yatate is simply the name given to that den of pure evil that is the Sunrise boardroom. Anyways, Phi Brain is an original anime by Sunrise airing in NHK’s Educational TV station. That doesn’t means it will be simply educational fluff, the timeslot has previously held Dennou Coil amongst other things. Sunrise original in timeslot that veers away from otaku pandering sounds like a good combo to me. Then why am I not more excited? Maybe it’s the uninspiring trailer. Maybe because it’s Junichi Sato again, and I can’t help shake the feeling he’ll be concentrating more on his beloved ~healing~ anime Tamayura then he will on Phi Brain.

Un-Go

There’s a misnomer in anime fandom that says ‘because it is in Noitamina, it will be good’ (mainly a line touted by myself, but shut up). Un-Go is an anime by Bones with the key staff from the original Full Metal Alchemist, doing an adaptation of an old classic novel with their own modern take on it. I would be excited for this whether it was in Noitamina or not. If anything, the fact it is in Noitamina is irritating because that means it’s stuck to 11 episodes. On the flip side, no Noitamina would mean that these kinds of anime wouldn’t be produced in the first place. Anywho, after a stumbling start to the year with Fractale, Noitamina have regained their strength somewhat with No.6 and Bunny Drop, so I’m hoping they finish this year off with a bang (especially since 2012 gets instant flop status with Black Rock Shooter). Mind you, it’s the other Noitamina show this season I’m more interested in…

Guilty Crown

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I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating again: Guilty Crown is like God came down and asked me what anime I want to see made (but only after he rejected my proposal for a 24 episode TV series by Studio Rikka). A story by the two key guys at Code Geass, being directed by the man who directed Death Note, with animation by Production IG who, by the trailer, appear to be channelling the work they did on Eden of the East. Awesome multiplied by Glorious to the power of Fuckwin. Unless you are the kind of individual who prefers more down-to-earth series with simpler aims, you boring sods. The only problem is this is in Noitamina, and therefore restricted to that accursed 11 episodes again. Or maybe they’ll let Guilty Crown run for 2 cours, seeing as they haven’t announced the second of winter’s Noitamina duo yet. “Hey guys, instead of letting Guilty Crown run for 2 cours, let’s go against the entire philosophy of this timeslot and run Black Rock Shooter!” Yeah, I’m totally not bitter or anything.

Mirai Nikki

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Mirai Nikki is an insanely popular manga about a diary that you can write the future in and YANDERE YANDERE YANDERE. Yeah, the fact that it has a yandere in it is all I ever seem to hear about it. So, for all you Mirai Nikki manga fans, prepare to weep tears of rage as you discover who is adapting it: asread. An animation studio so shit they don’t even capitalise their own name. Previously producers of  Kiddy Girl And, the two Minami-ke sequels and both seasons Shuffle. Oh, and they brought back the director who did all those shows to adapt Mirai Nikki. Yes, the tears of you fanboys are delightful, if it wasn’t for the fact I was actually quite looking forward to this myself.

Bakuman Season 2

Do I need to have seen the previous season?

Yes

[sigh] Bakuman. When making that picture, I thought I would be oh so funny and scribble out that shitty female character. Then I realised I was probably scribbling out the wrong character, and should take my paintbrush and subject it’s digital ink all over Mashiro, the real reason I got sick of Bakuman. But then I might as well scribble out Takagi as well for adhering to Mashiro’s pratty ways. And then keep scribbling over the entire picture until all that’s left is Nizuma. I might as well check out this new season, in case some kind of miracle occurs and the Death Note creator I once knew and loved actually makes his appearance, but I might end up dropping it like an angry hedgehog. That has diarrhoea. And is on fire.

Mashiro-iro Symphony

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Once upon a time, an animation studio with grand ambitions formed and tried to recapture the popularity of Cowboy Bebop, by making Samurai Champloo. Champloo was a pile of fun, ingenuity, wit and sheer unbridled coolness, and one of my favourite anime of all time. That was 2004. In the following years they tried to keep up this ambitious high quality, with anime like Ergo Proxy and Michiko to Hatchin. After 2008 though, they discovered this method wasn’t earning them enough money, so they gave up all pretence of quality and pumped out Sacred Blacksmith, a banal and dull fantasy show with the only redeeming factor being how hot the female characters were. Afterwards they adapted The World God Only Knows, an otaku in-joke panderfest manga with aspirations of  parody but was really just another bland harem. Afterwards they made House of Five Leaves, a laid-back samurai anime for Noitamina, but it sold fuck all so they made another TWGOK. Next season, they’re doing Mashiro-iro Symphony, an adaptation of a visual novel by the man who also wrote Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka. You are dead to me Manglobe.

Mobile Suit Gundam Age

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Do I need to have seen the previous seasons?

No. This is a totally new story, world and characters

This latest Gundam doesn’t have the Gundam fanbase out there too happy. This is largely because…well no, it’s entirely because of the rather childish character designs. Apparently having a 14 year old Gundam pilot actually looking like a 14 year old boy is license to lose your shit. I couldn’t really care what the characters look like, but that’s mainly because I’m not a Gundam fan. Mind you, I can see where both sides are coming from. From the director of Sergent Frog movies, to the story being penned by the creator of Inazuma 11, to help from the animation studio and staff who made Danball Senki, Gundam Age has a younger audience set firmly in its cross hairs. DVD/BD exclusive Unicorn/IGLOO and fujioshi-bait Seed/00 have obviously not done much to bring in the younger generation. I’m certainly interested in seeing what a Gundam with a younger skew while trying to retain the shows largely serious tone looks like, but I can’t say I’m bouncing in my seat in anticipation either. It is 50 episodes long though, and I always like seeing big ambitious mecha anime. I just wish it wasn’t always more bloody Gundam.

I Don’t Have Many Friends

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Prediction time! ‘I don’t have many friends’ will be touted as a a potential hit by certain light novel fans, while large swathes of the more elitist audience will remain sceptical. However, once the first episode airs, the more adventurous of anime fans will check it out and declare that, apart from a few kinks, ‘I don’t have many friends’ is a quality title about the loneliness of high teenage life and the anxiety and desire to fit in. Soon everyone jumps on the bandwagon, only for little things to start going wrong. As the anime proceeds beyond the first novel material, the original intent of the story starts to get lost. New female characters are introduced, and each one becomes less interested in being friends and more about wanting the male lead’s juicy manpiece. Soon the show starts introducing beach and hot spring episodes, leaning further and further into fanservice harem. The male lead starts accidentally undressing the female characters while falling onto them. Each character falls further away from what makes them unique and delve into cliche and stereotype, until finally the anime ends with some crowbarred attempt at conflict, no resolution and possibly some censored nudity. Call me back at Christmas when I’ve been proven correct.

C³

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Wait! Before you go running off at the sight of Yet Another Shana Clone, take a look at the trailer. The animation is from Silver Link, whose previous outings have only been the Baka to Test series. Not exactly world beating material, but the animation style was certainly imaginative. Silver Link are a spin-off from Shaft, with the director of Natsu no Arashi and ef, so they’re a studio willing to actually use what animation is capable of doing. The other interesting fact is the guy in charge of the script also wrote the script for 8 episodes of Cowboy Bebop of all things, as well as plenty of other quality series like Hare Guu and Big Windup under his belt. Obviously you have to remind yourself that, yes, this is another Shana clone, and bears all the annoying fan-pandering near-pedo tropes that such a series often has. I read the first chapter of the manga, and it included an accidental falling onto childhood friends boobs. That all said, keep your eyes on this. Just in case.

Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere

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Between Gundam Age, Phi Brain and this, Sunrise sure are busy this season. Mind you, they’re really only Sunrise in name, with none of the usual Sunrise staff apparently working on this. It’s based off a light novel, but with stuff like giant robots and fight scenes and fantasy setting, I started to get my hopes up. Then the trailer included bouncy boobs, absurdly large spiral twin tails, and a curious lack of noses. Worried, I checked the staff list and found the series was being directed by the people behind Dragonaut, Saki and Strike Witches. The cast of prats who produced Gonzo’s dying breaths! Argh nooooo, fuck these guys and their phobia of animating noses!

Invasion?! Squid Girl

Do I need to have seen the previous season?

Yes. It hasn’t got much of a plot, but it will assume you already know the characters

I’ve seen in season previews that people like to have a little whine about sequels to shows they’ve never seen before. Which always struck me as a bit of a silly complaint. Unless the show is ridiculously long to get through, why don’t you just watch the first season before the new version? You only have the right to complain about sequels when you’ve seen the previous season of unambitious trivial anthropomorphised  moeblob anime and know how crap it is. Ah shucks, I’m joking. I like Squid Girl. It’s nothing special, but it has a good sense of comedic timing de geso~

Kimi to Boku

JC Staff doing an anime about cute boys doing cute things…wait, what? What is this madness!?! Talk about crazy new ideas. However, from checking out the manga, in reality this is less a genderswapped Azumanga and more a generic shoujo with the bland eternally nice/shy female lead removed. It really was incredibly bland, but then I’ve been well documented to dislike shojo so take that with a pinch of salt. Director isn’t half bad, having previously done Elfen Lied and Sound of the Sky (Sora no Woto for you weeaboos out there), so I guess if bland shojo is your thing then you might as well check this out.

Persona 4 The Animation

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And the award to the most stylish anime trailer I have ever seen in my 3 years of season previewing goes to. Wow, does that ever look awesome. Persona 4 is based off a rather popular video game by the same name. No matter how many people try to assure me that the game has a great story, the words ‘video game adaptation’ send warning lights flashing everywhere. Asides from often paper-thin plotlines, trying to adapt the unique story-telling environment in video games to anime is a daunting and difficult task, one that often requires ignoring parts of the source material, much to the annoyance of the fans. So upon whom has this task of adapting this most daunting of games fallen on? Seiji Kishi, previous director of Angel Beats, Sunred, Kamisama Dolls and Seto no Hanayome. Now many people don’t like Kishi for his total ignorance of tone, but to my ADD addled mind, it’s something I’ve never really minded in his works. I personally like him, but I think he’s better suited for comedies, where his leaping between tones is best used for humour. That said, the trailer should show that the man also has a keen sense of style. Give him a game that is already stylish game to adapt and we have one of the most interesting anime of the season.

Ben-To

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Ben-to is about…oh look, I’ll just copypaste the synopsis

Satō goes to the supermarket one day and discovers a bento on sale at half price. Just as he reaches to grab it, he ends up on the floor unconscious. Satō has just entered the fierce, no-holds-barred “supermarket survival battle” for half-price bento

Yeah. It’s one of those nonsense school setting anime, like Baka to Test except without the promise of at least some neat animation. The studio doing this are David Production, whose previous works consist of Level E and Book of Bantorra. Neither of which are bad, I’ll grant them that. But in neither case did I feel they were improved significantly by the anime version. Of course, I’m speaking out of my ass here, not having read the source material for Bantorra or Level E, but whatever. I really have no idea what to make of this.

Fate/Zero

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Do I need to have seen the previous season?

Probably yes. It’s a non-canon prequel, but will probably require knowledge of the characters to understand the importance of their actions.

Now this is a genuinely interesting project. The Fate/Zero novel is essentially a piece of professional fanfiction from the Fate/Stay Night universe. Not that your average fanfiction writer could get their work adapted into an anime with animation by ufotable (Kara no Kyoukai) and music by Yuki Kaijura. It’s written by Gen Urabochi, the Nitro+ VN games writer and recently famous for coming up with Madoka Magica. All this comes together in this one big budget production Fate/Zero The Anime. So in anticipation for this, I started watching Fate/Stay Night and was shocked by how incompetent it was. I lasted a measly 2 episodes. I’ll probably still give Fate/Zero a whirl though. It’s meant to be a prequel of sorts, so you can probably jump in with no knowledge of the canon. Also, Urabochi is a much more succinct and capable writer than nasu, the Fate/Stay Night writer, in my totally biased opinion, so I’d prefer to see his iteration of the story.

Working’!!

Do I need to have seen the previous season?

Yes. Again, not much of a plot here, but it will assume you know the characters

Stop making sequels to anime I don’t like. Why don’t you make a sequel to this anime I like that has nothing to do with the creators of anime that did get a sequel, and didn’t sell very well anyway etc. etc. Yeah, I don’t like Working. Or Wagnaria, if we feel like reverse-weeabooing the name. Funny how the American title sounds more weeaboo than the Japanese title.

Maji de Watashi

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The game I play with eroge adaptations is find out how it is connected to Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka so I can justify never having to watch it. Right, eroge company is MinaSoft. Their only previous eroge turned anime was They Are My Noble Masters, which I honestly thought wasn’t half bad. How about the animation company? Err, Maji de Watashi is made by Lerche, whose previous productions include nothing else whatsoever. Well huh, maybe this won’t be so bad after all. How about the director Keitaro Motonaga? Aha! Here we go. Director of Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka, both TV series and OVA. Oh well, so much for that~

Shakugan no Shana III Final

Do I need to have seen the previous seasons?

Yes

Well, at least JC Staff have stopped pretending. Instead of simply releasing yet another batch of Shakugan no Shana clones, they’ve finally gone back and made the actual Shakugan no Shana. I notice they’re calling this Final. I wonder if that means that this will be the end of JC Staff produced Shana clones and they’ll start innovating and producing new and excitin-BWAHAHA ok I couldn’t keep a straight face typing that.

Maken-ki

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So, how many pantyshots did you count? I got 12. Pretty impressive for a trailer that’s less than 2 minutes long. Once you go beyond 3 in a trailer, that says all you need to know about the anime in question.

Hunter X Hunter Brotherhood

Do I need to have seen the previous season?

No. This is a totally new remake

Madhouse took a look at Bones remaking Full Metal Alchemist and though “hey, we can do that too”. Now if you had told me Madhouse were remaking a manga adaptation that never finished, I would have leapt out of my chair and proclaimed “CLAYMORE!?!”. But nope, that would be far too obvious and make them far too much money. Instead they’re giving the Brotherhood treatment to Hunter X Hunter. They didn’t even animate the first season to this. Oh well, at least it’s a remake, which means I can jump straight in. I tried watching the original TV series but I couldn’t get past the first episode.

World’s First Love Season 2

Do I need to have seen the previous season?

Yes

Hey girls, isn’t rape adorable~! Forcing yourself onto a weaker individual is totally OK because they can’t control their emotions, and it’s OK so long as the receiver enjoys it in the end. That’s what true love is all about!

Lupin III Thing

Do I need to have seen the previous seasons?

No. Every Lupin III special is written to be accessible to newcomers

There were some people saying this would be a new Lupin III reboot TV series. It’s not, stop getting your hopes up. It’s just another one of those specials Lupin III has every year. There were some other rumours going around that it would be headed up by a combination of Takashi Koike (the Redline director) and some Gainax folks, but again that’s just more wishful thinking rather than being based off any concrete evidence. I am a Lupin III fan, but the prospect of a new special doesn’t fill me with delight when there’s still 30-odd specials and the TV series I’ve yet to watch. While the good thing about the Lupin III franchise is that every one of these specials are made to be instantly approachable, the bad thing is that which ones are good and which aren’t are total crapshoots. Wait until reviews of this come out before you think about jumping in. For now, just go watch Castle of Cagliostro.

Busou Shinki Moon Angel

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Do you have a fetish for 6 inch high young teenage girls with robot joints wearing one-piece swimsuits? Well Japan has the cartoon for you! Oh Strike Witches, look what you’ve wrought.

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Battle Spirits: Heroes, Digimon Xros Wars – Toki wo Kakeru Shounen Hunter-tachi and Cross Fight B-Daman. I’m including them simply for completions sake. Yeah I know some of you folk out there like Digimon and are probably watching/watched Xros Wars. But I know fuck all about the franchise, so you’re better off searching elsewhere for information on it.

Movies

Normally I devote a measly single paragraph to movies, but this year I want to give some of these a bit more lipservice. Remember, while there are anime movies coming out in Japan this season, the rest of the world won’t see these until they come out on DVD/BD. With that in mind, I’m covering the anime movies that are coming out on DVD/BD over the next 3 months.

Towa no Quon

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This has been out for a while now, but nobody has subbed the blasted thing yet. Towa no Quon is a movie series in the same vein as Break Blade. 6 episodes, each 50 minutes long and getting a theatrical release before being released on home video. Like Break Blade (and Kara no Kyokai before it) these are beautifully animated big budget productions. It’s animated by Bones and directed by Umanosuke Iida, who passed away before he could see the movie reach the big screen. Shame, he was a really talented guy, working on Cowboy Bebop to The Big O to Hellsing to 08th MS Team. Admittedly a lot of the trailer and from what I’ve been hearing about it sounds awfully generic, but deliver tried and true concepts with enough flair and care and you’ll have a quality productions. Now we just need someone to sub the blasted thing…

Mardock Scramble

First Compression

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24th August

Feels like I’ve been writing about this thing’s release for ages now. Mardock Scramble is another one of these movie series projects. 3 movies long, it’s an adaptation of a novel by the same name. I’ve seen the movie already at a film festival and I really wasn’t that taken with it. It was all right, but delved into the unintentionally hilarious and stupid more than once. However the novel it’s been based off has gotten many rave reviews, so maybe I’ll turn out to be in the minority on this one.

There’s also Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha coming out on the 9th December, but that has gotten awful reviews so far, so I’m not particularly looking forward to that. There’s Fafner Heaven and Earth coming out on 21st September. So hurrah for that massive Fafner fanbase that exists out there…somewhere.

A Grade

Nothing here

B Grade

B+ No.6

Episodes 1–4

As much as I like to mock aspects of No.6, the very parts I find myself mocking are the ones I really like. Take the incredibly obvious BL tones, where every line of dialogue between Nezumi and Shion can be twisted into innuendo, and sometimes not even needing innuendo. Yet this largely stems from the fact that I really like watching the relationship these two have sprung up. This is a BL duo I can get behind, although not literally. It’s also a touch pretentious, what with rats telling Shion what book he should be drawing comparisons from next. Yet, again, I like the comparisons with literature and how they phrase the world the characters are in.

B+ Mawaru PenguinDrum

Episodes 1–4

My main complaint from the first episode was the down times between the madness were rather dull due to uninteresting dialogue. PenguinDrum has since solved that by being riotously funny. There’s that touch of the utterly bonkers to everything this show does, that makes it so simple to enjoy. Even when you’re not trying to uncover the meaning to the train imagery, it’s still incredibly fun. Besides, it might just be the old Utena thing again of the scenes either wearing their intentions on their chest, or actually meaning nothing at all and they just wanted to fuck with your flowcharts. The turn PenguinDrum has taken from the first episode has meant a tone down in the madness though, so I hope we see that side a bit more as it goes on.

B Bunny Drop

Episodes 1–4

Bunny Drop is a very simple case of an anime knowing exactly what it wants to do and does it with care and minimal fuss. There’s barely any artistic flair (the watercolour segments at the start of each episode just strike me as artwank from someone who liked Wandering Son) and minimal BGM, but everything it does fits together perfectly. My personal favourite part, apart from watching Rin just being a 6 year old girl, is the gradual development of Daikichi’s character as he alters what it is he wants from life. How he has no free time, yet the fact doesn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. He’s the kind of character I find myself wanting to be happy, because he deserves it. I just hope that RUMOURED BAD ENDING never appears in the anime. There’s probably not the time for it anyway with only 11 episodes.

B Steins;Gate

Episodes 14–17

Not the best month for Steins;Gate, what with the plot taking the highway to sillyville and having an entire episode focusing on Feyris, but there’s still more than enough here for it to still be one of the best shows of the year. Despite turning a bit silly at times, it still spends enough time delving into each characters personality and motivations that you are able to enjoy watching their exploits. I live each of these characters emotional turns myself, with every episode stripping more away from Okarin’s persona as he delves further into the chaotic world of time travel. Also, I AM MAD SCIENTIST, IT SO COOOOL, SONAVABITCH!

B– Tiger and Bunny

Episodes 14–18

I’m still waiting for the time Tiger and Bunny will reach a monthly roundup where its improvements aren’t instantly cancelled out by newly introduced flaws. One the positive side, I’m really enjoying the development of Tiger’s character, finally tackling his family life, even if he still acts like a total doofus. Plus there was Sky High’s special episode, which was far and away the best of the series so far. Problem is, that’s instantly balanced out by the series ruining all the development they did to Bunny’s character in the first half of the series by now making an eternally happy blank slate. Thankfully the latest episode looks to be turning him back to angsty Bunny again.

B– Kamisama Dolls

Episodes 1–4

I like Kamisama Dolls far more than it probably deserves. There’s moments where it gets struck by the derp, and decides what this anime really needs is for the main character to walk in on a girl in the bath. Or for extended sequences of the little sister eating cake. But what I really like about this show is how so many of the characters are just a touch unhinged that you never quite know what they’re going to do. From the more obvious cases like Aki, who has less a screw lose and more an entire scaffolding, to less severe but just as interesting cases like Kuuko, the paranormal freak. It keeps the tension up and keeps me intrigued even through the flaws.

B– Natsume Yuujinchou San

Episodes 1–4

A bit hit-or-miss for Natsume. First and third episodes were meh, while second and fourth were excellent. Natsume excels when it focuses on the pride of characters forcing them into loneliness, only to be dragged out again by Natsume as he connects with their own loneliness. Where it doesn’t excel is when Natsume spends his time narrating over how lovely the weather is and how lovely his family and friends are. I’ve just never bought into Natsume’s friendship, because he’s so distant from them. It made episode 3 with Tanuma fall rather flat. Still, it’s well worth it for those moments where it clicks. The tree spirit desperately wanting to see Natsume again so she could scare him, only for him to move house, stung like a bitch.

B– Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Trail

Episode 5

My main problem with Roberta’s Trail is I could not follow Rock’s plan in the slightest. Granted, that’s more with how I watched them, waiting 3–4 months between each episode does not help, so it might be more understandable to those who marathon it in one go. That said, there was still more than enough classic Black Lagoon in here, from the gloriously cynical lines to the awesome actions scenes. I particularly liked how, after getting annoyed at how badass this OVA wanted to portray Rock, Roberta’s Trail revealed at the end that he’s still the one pair of alive eyes in a dead town. It was a rather poetic way of describing his situation. Now, if you don’t mind me asking Madhouse, new season where?

B– Blue Exorcist

Episodes 12–15

Well holy buggering chickens, the plot for Blue Exorcist has finally started to move somewhere, and I am as interested in the grand mystery going on as I am interested in scrotum piercings. Thankfully, Blue Exorcist seems to know this too, and just tosses in little mentions to it occasionally (usually by people standing on top of buildings having vague and confusing expositionary conversations), using the rest of the time to focus on how this all affects Rin. Okumura Rin is Blue Exorcist. He brings out the best in every other character, even ones like Shiemi who would otherwise be painful to watch. Between Okarin, Tiger and Rin, it’s been a good season for male leads. At least, it was, until JC Staff blundered in with God’s Memo Pad.

B– Hanasaku Iroha

Episodes 14–18

Something mysterious happened after the Ohana to Tokyo arc. All the characters suddenly became likeable. Even the previously shitty ones, like that engrish spouting bitch. Not that they’re using the characters to much effect. What is the overarching plot to this series again? Who gets to inherit Kissisuo? Pah, I couldn’t give a toss about that. I just want to see hot anime girls in wet t-shirt contests, which Hanasaku Iroha delivers with surprising consistency. Even better, it does so without being retarded about it. This is a series that is goofy and self-aware enough to have two characters performing their best Quidditch impressions without someone pointing out to us how wacky it is that they’re doing this. It’s nice to have a series in which I want to drool over hot anime girls without having it insult my intelligence.

C Grade

C+ Kaiji Season 2

Episodes 13–17

I know this is kind of par for the course for Kaiji, but the only thing that happened in episode 17 was someone turned on a TV. Sorry, but this bog arc does not have the same thrill as the underground arc. The stakes felt more real down there, hyping up the tension and made the experience that much more thrilling. Somehow, inside this new casino, the stakes just don’t feel the same. Ultimately though, it’s still Kaiji. There’s still people with ridiculous noses. The narrator is still over-excitedly pulling bizarre metaphors out of nowhere. There are still people going zawa zawa zawa in the background.

C+ Break Blade

Episode 6

I lost interest in Break Blade’s story DURING episode 4, mainly because it HAD also lost interest in itS original story. The mecha battles are still as gloriously animated and wonderfully directed as ever, which sounds like it shouldn’t be so much of a problem. Break Blade was always about the gloriously animated mecha battles, why should a drop in story quality really effect it? Well because, my hypothetical questioner, without framing for the fights, it’s just a load of pretty colours for no grounding. I stopped caring about the story when it suddenly couldn’t remember why Rygart was fighting anymore. If it can’t remember, then why should I?

D Grade

D+ God’s Memo Pad

Episodes 1–3

Perhaps in a less packed season, I would have given God’s Memo Pad a better chance. The problem I had was the show wasn’t a Good Anime with moments of stupidity, like Kamisama Dolls. The underlying structure to God’s Memo Pad was full of uninteresting mysteries, a painfully bland male lead, irritating females characters who the show tried to push the moe-ness off, and so on. It did shine occasionally, and some of the way it phrased dialogue was genuinely witty and intelligent. But I didn’t feel it worth my time just to sit around in smelly water for those occasional wafts of brilliance.

D– Sacred Seven

Episodes 1–3

The warning lights were set off when the female character, who had suddenly appeared in the main characters life, revealed through a flashback that they knew each other when they were younger. Hellooooo Deadman Wonderland vibes! Why put so much funding into something so bland Sunrise? Please tell me what Sacred Seven has going for it? The animation is beautiful and some of the fights are truly gorgeous, plus sometimes it gets so stupidly camp that it’s fun to laugh at, but what does this series have? What is there to keep me, you, or anyone from ever remembering that it existed? Stupid show, not wasting my time on it.

E Grade

No terrible OVAs to mock this month, mainly because I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Baby Princess.

F Grade