The Anime TV Thread

I LOVE IT!

Douay-Rheims-Challoner:

So where did you watch the first episode of The Next Chapter? I had trouble finding it, though I now have the OVA saved to watch. In the meantime, I've been rewatching the first episodes and falling in love with the show all over again. I had almost forgotten just how good the show already was by episode 2 with Light of the Eyelid.

Excited! I'll watch as soon as it becomes free

I think Crunchyroll shows episodes for free after a week or so has passed, so if there's just the premiere episode, it won't be free til the second one is out or maybe a day or two before/after

So great to see my opinion expressed by someone else. The TV show is so repetitive to the point of boredom, with those goddamn gates popping up a million times, but seeing the film after the TV show is an amazing treat. The film is beautiful and tells a much better story when you already know everything because it can just be surreal and weird.

I watched some show called Kiniro Mosaic over the weekend because it was on my Not Actually Netflix for cheap as free. I guess it was an antics based comedy about a British girl who goes to Japan to study. It was a far cry from the death and destruction and over the top punch fights of the last two shows I'd watched (Attack on Titan and Kill La Kill) so I guess that's an okay thing.

As a foreigner living in Asia, I could relate to some of the situations that befell the British girl. Also there were tiny lesbians.

Lifemate was in the city to take a class on bees, and we were wondering what was going on in the middle of all the cherry blossum tourists.

I finally watched the OVA and, my goodness, it was so good. The cameos! Especially the montage during the eclipse. That was beautiful.

Is this spam?

Douay-Rheims-Challoner: Masaaki Yuasa is writing and directing an episode of Adventure Time this season.

I tried The World Is Still Beautiful and I concur, it's just kind of there. I guess it's slightly less cliched by the third episode but that's not saying a lot. I had a bystander in the same room with me while I was watching and I was squirming in embarrassment whenever that rainmaking song came on.

Regarding anime music, Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto actually had a good soundtrack. The series itself was made for history nerds, but the type of history nerd with nasally voices who go, "Excuse me, Lord such-and-such was in Kyoto on this date. He wasn't actually in Tokyo until two weeks later! <Snort, snort> I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder." Plus I didn't know enough about the early Meiji perid to follow along and I'm not doing homework just to watch a TV show. Damn all history otaku for their obesssive cataloguing.

But the music was good, I used to rock out to the soundtrack. I'll find a link later.

And here's the thingy I posted on the weeked pop culture thing which you were conspicuously absent from:

Beyond the Boundary reminds me a lot of Noragami in tone and subject matter. It's more high school in its sensibility, but I actually prefer it because the story seems to be more focused. The premise - a half-monster high school boy teams up with his cursed demon hunter female classmate - sounds like something from a mid-90's horror anime. You know, something on the lines of Vampire Hunter D or Blood: The Last Vampire or another series equally grim, bloody, and batshit. But this isn't the 90's and this show approaches things from a slightly different angle. For one thing, the animation really has improved a lot since then. The characters also aren't such enigmas and have motivations nowadays.

Speaking of genre, I don't know why this is a thing, but there are a whole bunch of anime shows about high school kids fighting invisible and intangible supernatural creatures. I suppose at its base it's a metaphor for puberty and for how teenagers can feel like they're struggling with stuff that adults are unable to see or unwilling to care about.

Sailor Moon is coming back, and her legs are too long:
www.themarysue.com/new-sailor-moon-cast/

Well, I'm watching Spice & Wolf and I like it. I actually watch the opening instead of fast-forwarding, which is rare for me (I'm skipping past the second opening, though). It's nice to have a medieval story that isn't about knights and princes. The singular importance of staying on the Church's good side is well-represented, though it also shows that people would also hedge their bets with a little bit of pagan rituals. I particularly liked its depiction of currency speculation, though the show doesn't mention that kingdoms would lower the gold and silver content in their coinage mostly because their economies were getting run down to pay for the rulers' military adventurism.

Though missing again in this medieval depiction is the Jewish moneylender component of the medieval economy, which basically served as free money for medieval kings whenever the economy was on a downturn. Mostly it went like this: "Hey Jews, guess what? My debts don't exist anymore. Also, I own your businesses now and you can't stay in this country. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Also, a followup on Beyond the Boundary: my previous panegyric was based on the early episodes. After the first arc the story becomes episodic and you get stuff like the characters forming a pop idol band to defeat a monster obsessed with scantily clad girls and rhythmic motion set to insipid music. The opening shot of the episode is of female clothes covered in goo and scattered carelessly on the floor while squeaking sounds repeat in the background. It turns out the scene is in a shower and the sound is of a shampoo dispenser that's run out of shampoo, but for like 20 seconds we're clearly supposed to think the squeaking is that of a bed where teenage sexing is occurring. The question is why.

How is the story improved by this fakeout or how does the scene tickle our lower instincts? Because it's actually not very sexy, so I'm not sure what it's doing in this episode. Actually, I'm not sure why this episode exists to begin with. To get metastructural, maybe the episode is some kind of homage to cheapo commercial-delivery series from the 80s that would pad their episode count with this sort of nothing. I mean, I guess the episode is kind of funny, particularly the training montage which runs through the cliches of the musical group story in 60 seconds (vocal practice, band members rebelling against the overbearing leader, an emotional reconciliation in the rain, etc).

Ah, dammit, I've been giving this thing more thought than I wanted to. Curse you, grad school, I can never stop analyzing things now. Ok, my judgment at the show's halfway point is that
the show isn't all that. It's pleasant enough to veg to but if you see there's only one copy of the DVDs at the library and there's an old lady in your way, it's not worth the trouble to shove her out of your way so you can grab the series before someone else can.

Actually, I'm making that my new rating system. "How many old ladies would you push down the stairs to get your hands on this piece of pop culture?"

Both openings for Spice and Wolf are lovely, sarapen, and I enjoyed both seasons a great deal. But as nice as the openings are the goofy nonsense English of the original ending song is also is something I really like. It was a charming series aNd it was nice to see it grow from an oddball cult hit into an extremely popular show, though I can't say I'm that keen on the more otaku-bait-y aspects of that popularity (which can be summed up with how Holo is commodified.)

The second season changed studio to Brains Base - at the time the home of Baccano and later Durararara so this was that studio at their peak creativity, so the animation improves a far bit in that season (but they retained much of the staff including the voice actors and director.) Alas it also left the door open for a third season that never happened, though the similar economics-and-romance-based-on-a-light-novel anime Maoyu used the same voice cast for a show that banked on its similarity but ultimately wasn't as satisfying.