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Oct 19, 2021
What the fuck.
Sound - For a 12 episode series the effort put into the soundtrack here is extremely impressive. Most tracks have heavy electronica influences. Most tracks also sound like they would belong in a strip club. Tracks like “Technodildo” weren’t exactly my cup of tea but the show nails the tone it was going for. Voice acting is good. The English dub voice acting is really good. In part I think this is because the show throws around a lot of profanity and English is just better suited to handle that than Japanese.
Art - Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt (PSG) was released in
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2010 but the animation here is better than most modern anime. Aesthetically its unique and animation quality is smooth. It’s primarily a blend of Japanese and American styles. Which again compliments the tone of the show. Sometimes it mixes things up with a brief live-action scene or shift to a more traditional “anime” style. CG is also implemented extremely well. It allows for some cool 3D camerawork during action scenes.
If any core themes exists in PSG it would be freedom and sex-positivity. Panty fucks literally 1,000 people over the course of season 1. However, because of the series’ angular artstyle, no character is drawn to be visually attractive. Panty has sex without really being sexualized herself. The only point where characters are sexualized would be the magical-girl esque transformations. These occur with a literal strip pole in the background. Equating magical-girl transformations to a strip routine is a scathing and very much well-deserved roast of the genre.
Characters - Every significant character is named after a piece of underwear (Panty, Stocking, Garterbelt, Brief etc). Panty and Stocking are angels who got booted out of Heaven for being lustful and glutinous respectively. Garterbelt is a seemingly strait-laced priest who has a thing for young boys (appropriate for a priest) and bondage. He reminded me a lot of Chef from Southpark. Brief is the only “normal” human character and tends to get steamrolled by the other characters with stronger personalities. No one is particularly complex but everyone has enough depth to satisfyingly play off other cast members.
Story - PSG has an episodic structure and is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality. The overarching plot is that Panty and Stocking need to defeat enough Ghosts (giant monsters) to earn their way back into Heaven. Almost every episode ends with a Ghost being defeated, but the journey to that point varies susbstantially. As the character names suggest, the plot and humor here is pretty crude. Some of episodes land the concept better than others. Like the sperm and milk episodes were pretty basic, but then the nose-picking episode was super cool. The vomit episode was super depressing. The court episode was so good that Ace Attorney, which it was parodying, later referenced it. One episode is just a series of conversations shot in one room. The last episode approaches End of Evangelion levels of “what the fuck is this.” It feels like whoever made PSG had a fun time doing it. The enthusiasm is infectious and helps compensate for the show’s weaker moments.
Conclusion - It deserves a season 2.
7/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 19, 2021
To strike or not to strike, that is the question.
Utsu Museum Sayuri is a timeless depiction of a young girl’s journey into adulthood. The scene opens to a plane stretching out into infinity. On this plane exist Sayuri, her husband Hiroshi, and her Mama and Papa. Although the horizon is limitless Sayuri’s existence is constrained; she lives cloistered together with her husband and parents.
This all changes when the time to strike arrives. The initial impetus to strike comes from Sayuri’s Papa. That will is then picked up by Sayuri’s Mama, and is eventually echoed by the crowd of bystanders. The peer pressure to
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strike is intense. Yet Sayuri does not succumb to the pressure. When she strikes it is not for anyone other than herself. It is a pure act of self-actualization as evidenced by the words, “It will be wonderful. Yes. Yes.”
When Sayuri strikes she strikes against her family, against society, against moral convention, against the laws of nature, and against the very fabric of existence itself. Thus earning her the title “Striking Girl Sayuri.”
Sayuri’s strike is an intensely personal gesture yet carries far-reaching ramifications. Sayuri’s strike is a reminder of the importance of freedom and of its heavy price. Freedom is not free. If only we could all have the courage to stand by our convictions like Utsu Musume Sayuri.
10/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Sep 15, 2021
What happens when you fuse the zany visuals of Dr. Seuss with the oppressive tone of Orwell’s 1984? You get Kaiba; a beautiful dystopia on the verge of nihilism.
Sound - Good stuff. Lots of retro noises which compliments the art style. Background music is a good blend of wonder and haunting. Especially Chroniko’s theme / the Tree Song.
Art - Kaiba’s strong point. The art style is unique and nice to look at. Resembles something like the Cat in the Hat or classic animation from the 1960’s. This makes it all the more jarring when a plant sucks out an old lady’s brain or
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a person literally explodes from too much pleasure. The simple lines and relative lack of detailing allow for fluid animations and funky shifts in perspective.
Characters - For a 12 episode series Kaiba does an impressive job managing as large a cast as it does and having them all feel significant. In the first half most characters come and go within the span of an episode. And more often than not these characters do not go out on a happy note. Kaiba is merciless when it comes to making its characters suffer. From an old Grandma living alone with two ungrateful grandchildren to a man traveling the stars with his wife who cheated on him; the problems Kaiba’s characters face are profound. Yet this makes it all the more satisfying when a character actually finds happiness.
Story - Kaiba’s world is a dystopia where memories and bodies have become commodified. Technology where an individual can store their memories on a computer chip has become ubiquitous. This allows for the sick and elderly to transfer their memories into new healthier bodies. Alternatively it allows for the poor to auction off their memories of music and literature or literally sell their bodies to the rich. The world is ruled by a monarch but he exercises little real power. The true horrors of Kaiba are caused by the free market. I thought this was a fun change of pace from the standard fascism-based dystopia.
Conclusion - Watching Kaiba is like a trip through the world’s most badass art museum.
8/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Aug 7, 2021
As of 08/07/21 One Piece is currently 986 episodes with room for at least another 300 before the series concludes. Watching One Piece is a major time investment. In the time it takes to catch up with the show you can learn to ride a unicycle, whistle, or pick up Japanese. With this in mind do I recommend One Piece? No. One Piece has some of the best moments in Shonen anime but the journey is only for the most dedicated or braindead of weebs.
Sound - Sound is good. Luffy’s rubber noises, Zoro’s swords, Law’s Room, background tracks, etc are all memorable but (like
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most things here) can get repetitive. Voice acting is good.
Art - There are three main styles; Pre-Timeskip (ep1~500), Post-Timeskip (ep500~890), and Wano (ep890~ ). Pre-Timeskip is my favorite of the three. It’s nothing crazy but overall solid. Post-Timeskip opts for a brighter color palette while making body proportions stranger across the board. Animation quality takes a significant hit and female characters get really big boobs. Wano keeps to the style of Post-Timeskip while adding more texture and fluidity to the animation. As the series progresses increasing amounts of time are dedicated to reaction shots. This is when the camera cuts to a few side characters with their mouth open in joy/surprise/fear/sadness in response to whatever just happened. These shots are barely animated, usually just some squiggles around the eye or a jaw moving up and down, and serve to pad for time. The Dressrosa arc is particularly bad with this. The camera cutting to all the tiny midget people every two minutes made me want to kill myself.
Characters - One Piece characters are pretty standard. They’re not particularly deep but each fill a niche in progressing the narrative and worldbuilding while also being cool. No individual character is particularly mind-blowing but the way the series manages to keep so many of them relevant across hundreds of episodes is impressive.
Story - The world of One Piece is amazing, the plot is mediocre, and the pacing is awful. The story follows Monkey D. Luffy, who ate a magic fruit which turned his body into rubber, on his journey to find the One Piece and become King of the Pirates. The main story is broken into dozens of smaller individual arcs that tend to follow one of two patterns; a member of Luffy’s crew leaves and needs to be rescued or a country has been taken over by a pirate and needs to be saved. The rescue arcs (Arlong Park, Enies Lobby, Marineford / Impel Down, Whole Cake) are better than the nation-saving ones (Alabasta, Skypeia, Thriller Bark, Fishman Island, Dressrosa, Wano) with a few exceptions. What makes One Piece special is the power system and lore tying all these arcs together. The series’ core is a bunch of pirates who eat magic fruits and fight eachother while running from marines. Layers are added to this in the form of how people counter magic fruit usage and what type of government sponsors such an oppressive marine force. Other long-running Shonen either collapse into nonsense from a lack of foresight (Dragon Ball Z / Super) or morph into something entirely alien from the original concept (Naruto) but One Piece has been building up its core for 20+ years. The magic fruit system has evolved to the point where it can stand toe to toe with the nen system of Hunter x Hunter or the alchemy of Full Metal Alchemist. Ideas are set up in the first season that pay off 900 episodes in the future. Which is all very cool. Unfortunately getting to episode 900 is an absolute slog. Early seasons are fun but because the anime releases one episode per week the pacing is gradually throttled to a crawl to avoid catching up with the manga. The majority of episodes past 500 feel like watching a highschool presentation where the student has some good ideas but didn’t prepare and is just stalling for time until 30min of class ends.
Conclusion - A 5/10 anime with occasional flashes of genre-defining brilliance.
6/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Aug 7, 2021
The best animated show with anthropomorphized animals since Bojack Horseman. Produced by the studio behind classics such as Pokémon and Berserk ‘97.
Sound - The voice acting is great, especially the guy who does Yano. The opening is a banger.
Art - All the characters being animals adds nice visual variety. The washed out color palette contributes surrealist undertones which contrast with the otherwise hyper-realistic setting and characters. Most scenes are heavily dialogue based and involve little movement, but what’s there is animated fluidly.
Characters - The characters are presented as animals but on the inside they’re unmistakably human. There’s a middle aged
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monkey who’s addicted to dating apps. An alpaca crushed under the loans she took out for nursing school and who also happens to be proficient in capoeira. A poodle with some shady connections aiming for idol stardom. There’s around a dozen such individuals and each one connects to another three-ish people forming a pretty intricate overall dynamic. Smack in the middle of everything is the coolest taxi driver in the universe, a walrus who ironically has a phobia of water.
Story - Odd Taxi’s primary narrative thrust is as a mystery with secondary slice of life and comedic elements. It revolves around a taxi driver who becomes embroiled with the city’s criminal underbelly after supposedly giving a lift to a young girl who’s gone missing. Watching all the connections between characters come to light is satisfying. The narrative manages to be dense without being cluttered and runs like clockwork. Lesser mysteries withhold key information so they’re impossible to figure out beforehand. Like Darth Vader being Luke's father or the bullshit in Sherlock Holmes. Odd Taxi respects its viewer's intelligence. Twists are set up so, if you really think it over, you can piece together where the story is headed before events unfold.
Conclusion - An anime I would feel comfortable recommending to my mom.
9/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 19, 2021
A low-effort adaptation.
Sound - Voice acting is good, background music is fairly basic and unremarkable.
Art - The animation here sucks. Lots of still shots. Not much is actually animated. Walkure suffers from many of the problems that plague One Piece. Whenever a main character so much as farts the show goes through a minute of reactions shots from spectators to pad for time. In One Piece this is somewhat forgivable. New episodes have aired every week since like 1999 and the show can’t outpace its manga source material. There is no reason to do this with a 12 episode Netflix show.
Characters -
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Characters aren’t complex but they’re cool on a surface level and get the job done. I particularly liked Thor’s pulsating meat hammer. Adam gets some good lines. Kojiro is likable.
Story - The concept is solid. History’s greatest humans challenging Gods to a best of 13 series of death matches to prevent the apocalypse is a simple but fun premise. However, the plot’s simplicity places a heavy emphasis on spectacle, compounding the show’s animation problems. It’s hard to deliver on spectacle with animation that’s as fluid as peanut butter. Then when the show fails to deliver that, there’s not much else to like.
Conclusion - Not offensively bad but not worth watching. The manga is better.
4/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jun 13, 2021
The harem genre is the trashiest of anime genres. Monogatari is a harem anime. The show is so good that despite this handicap it is still one of the best works in the medium.
Sound - The show has five different openings over 26 episodes. Mousou Express and Kogarashi Sentiment are bangers. Voice acting is top-notch.
Art - You could write an essay analyzing the art style of Monogatari. Backgrounds are abstracted and constantly shifting to match the tone of conversations. The use of color is exceptional. The series’ scene composition borrows elements from the French New Wave. There are other shows with larger budgets to
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throw at animation quality but the creativity here is off the chain.
Characters - Like how Evangelion explores the psychological trauma a 12yr old child would face when being asked to save the world from space aliens, Monogatari explores the absurdity of real people having to fit harem genre stereotypes. The result is a surprisingly complex and engaging cast of characters. Dialogue is done particularly well. However without speaking fluent Japanese you won’t pick up on the finer nuances of the series’ wordplay. Second Season ties off the main arcs for everyone except Araragi and Kanbaru. Nadeko really kills it here. She had the worst arc in Bakemonogatari but has some of the best scenes this season. The conclusion to Hanekawa’s arc is predictable but still hurt to watch. Then Kaiki’s character gets re-contextualized brilliantly.
Story - The narrative is a deconstruction and parody of the harem genre. Within the first few episodes of the series Araragi (the protagonist) enters into a stable relationship with his girlfriend and, through an unhealthy obsession with “saving everyone,” establishes his harem. The rest of the story focuses on Araragi and the Araragi harem club collectively growing up and learning to take better care of themselves. Anime has a lot of shows (ie Re Zero, Eromanga Sensei, Naruto etc) where all the side characters end up having their value defined by their relation to the protagonist. Monogatari’s structure is much more democratic. The Second Season is broken down into five arcs with each focusing on a different character. Overall it nails the follow through on the foreshadowing and setups from earlier seasons. Weird narrative techniques which were present before are more prominent here. Unreliable narration is prevalent throughout. Events occur out of chronological order. Then Nekomonogatari: Shiro and Hitagi End both unfold almost entirely without Araragi. Hitagi End is a highlight and has one of the coolest resolutions ever. But each arc has some banger moments.
Conclusion - Monogatari is a unique and special snowflake and Second Season is the series at its peak. It is extremely heavy on dialogue though so if that’s not your cup of tea then avoid it like the plague.
10/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jun 12, 2021
“If it’s not broken then don’t fix it” sums up the show in a nutshell.
Sound - It’s fine. Deku’s voice actor is appropriate for the Senpai.
Art - Better than it has any right to be. Movements are fluid and particular care is shown towards facial expressions (as expected when the author is a hentai artist). The art style is just barely different enough to be distinct and is overall clean looking.
Characters - You’ve got the Senpai, Nagatoro, and the Friends. Senpai is pretty lame and extremely cringe inducing, but that’s what the show is going for. Over time he does become
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less lame and I ended up more invested in his development than I expected to be. Nagatoro is a sadist and exists to screw with Senpai. She does a decent job. Her expressions where one eye is all squinty and the other is open wide are cute. The Friends exist to screw with the Senpai and Nagatoro. They balance out the power dynamic.
Story - The story is broken up into small vignettes that largely exit in isolation. The only real continuity is in how the characters’ relationships with one another develop over time. Each scene fits one of three patterns; Nagatoro screws with Senpai and he gets embarrassed, Nagatoro screws with Senpai, something goes wrong, and they’re both embarrassed, or the Friends screw with Senpai and Nagatoro gets jealous. Super basic stuff but it is executed well. The show is equal parts cringe, funny, and wholesome.
Conclusion - Compared to the rampant incest and pedophilia in other romance-genre anime (ie Domestic Girlfriend / Eromanga Sensei) the mild BDSM vibes here are refreshingly vanilla.
6/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 6, 2021
It's half-baked.
Sound - It’s fine.
Art - The art style is bland but the actual animation quality is pretty good.
Characters - A mixed bag. The protagonist, Satoru, is not particularly interesting and doesn’t develop over the course of the story. Also until the last episode both of his potential romantic interests are underage while he’s like 26. The antagonist isn’t sympathetic, mysterious or smart but can be mildly intimidating and he gets the job done. Satoru’s mom is awesome. Kano’s mom is also great. Satoru’s elementary school friends are generic but fine.
Story - The entire narrative hinges around Satoru having time-travel abilities
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but basic questions like “why does he have these powers” or “how do they work” are never explained. Instead they just trigger at times convenient to the plot. If the author isn’t going to bother to think through how his time-travel gimmick functions then it shouldn’t have been included in the first place. Satoru spends most of the show working with his elementary school buddies to catch a serial child murderer. That stuff is solid. Has some classic Stand by Me / E.T. vibes. It did not need time-travel. If they still needed to spice things up they could’ve made the antagonist a secret satanist who hangs with demons and eats children. Or something. The ending also sucks. The antagonist makes some really stupid decisions and the resolution doesn’t feel earned.
Conclusion - Erased is enjoyable enough but also has some significant flaws. The show is missing any cool action scenes, humor, originality or thoughtful messaging that could’ve compensated for its mediocre characters and plot.
5/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jun 4, 2021
The story is like Star Wars told from the perspective of the Galactic Empire.
Sound - Background music gives off melancholy surrealist vibes which complement the narrative. Relies on only a few tracks but what’s there is solid.
Animation - Has some killer landscape shots and the overall art style is above average. Buddhist aesthetics are neat. Scenes involving movement tend to be poorly lit and happen too fast to digest what’s going on.
Characters - Shin Sekai Yori’s characters are less significant as individuals than they are as cogs to develop the show’s worldbuilding. Everyone here (except Squealer) views the world from a flawed, narrow,
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and subjective perspective. The show does a good job of making all these dissonant and contrasting perspectives sympathetic to the viewer. Taken as a collective, these characters form a mosaic that provide a fairly holistic image of what's up.
Story - The story is built like an onion. At the core is the question of how humanity would have to adapt to accommodate a community of psychic super-beings where a single individual has the power of an atomic bomb in their brain. Layers are gradually added to this core and the end result, Kamisu-66, is a hyper-authoritative police state that is also super racist. Each layer of this fascist onion exists for a reason. The most monstrous events happen either out of perceived necessity or indifference. Psychic ability in the show is referred to as “Power.” So those with “Power” literally oppress those who have none. The story’s protagonists eventually grow up to be complicit in the fascist onion. Few shows have the balls to so completely cede the philosophical highground to their antagonist.
-Spoilers-
Squealer is the antagonist of Shin Sekai Yori but his bloody rebellion against the psychics of Kamisu-66 in the finale for the freedom and equality of his Monster Rat brethren would make George Washington proud. Despite being human in every way but appearance, the Monster Rats are treated by the psychic community like poop. Entire colonies containing thousands of individuals are routinely exterminated for minor infractions. In the end, after Squealer’s rebellion inevitably fails, Saki grants his tortured remains a quick death. Ironically this final act of mercy is only possible because Saki still does not recognize Squealer’s humanity (if a psychic kills a fellow “human” they get a heart attack and die). The priest Rijin, an insignificant character who dies within minutes of his introduction towards the beginning of the show, is the only psychic to even partially acknowledge the humanity of the Monster Rats. Change is hard.
-End Spoilers-
Conclusion - Shin Sekai Yori has a motif of mirrors and reflections. Flaws in the society of Kamisu-66 are extreme and easy for the viewer to spot but are much more difficult to recognize for the characters who were raised in and inhabit that society. The show does not dwell on whether Kamisu-66 is good or bad (it obviously sucks), but rather on how it can be improved. Reform requires recognizing flaws in what one has been raised to consider “normal.” This starts with a mirror. At its best Shin Sekai Yori tries to be that mirror.
9/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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