The Anime TV Thread

So far this season's standouts for me are Hinamatsuri and Megalobox. The former had a very solid premiere episode but has very much come into its own with the subsequent two episodes, there's a great natural chemistry among the show's assembly of characters and it mines a lot of good gags from the incongruity of their personalities and the odd situations in which they find themselves, there's also just not nearly enough shows featuring proper delinquents and/or Yakuza for my tastes and that aspect alone gives the characters a bit of a distinct vibe from your general seasonal fare. The show works a bit better when it's aiming for comedy rather than drama for me, but so far the balance has been about right.

Megalobox is of course an extremely loose adaptation of an already storied franchise and also a sports anime and as such has a certain inlaid structure it can follow for success but it's nevertheless excelling in its execution. I can be a little wary of shows where the primary appeal is that they simply look or feel like the anime of yesteryear (namely the 'cool' anime of the later 1980s and especially 1990s) as trying to capture a nostalgic appeal is obviously no recipe for creating something that's actually engaging (see Dimension-W) but the writing and story beats have so far delivered a show that's genuinely badass and not merely reaching for it. It also features two of the season's best OP/EDs that both perfectly capture the show's trashily cool aesthetic.




Beyond those two, Golden Kamuy is quite a solid watch on account of an engaging core conflict, distinct cast and unique historical focus but it's also one of the season's more frustrating shows in that while I do quite enjoy watching it, one can't help but feel that it could have been something truly excellent rather than just good with a more confident directorial approach and less budgetary challenges.



Umamusume is the much joked about horse girl anime about....girls who are also horses, who race and are named after real race horses and also go to high school with a minor yuri angle and also they do idol activities? It sounds like an utterly absurd mishmash of about 40 different contemporary anime trends but in practice it's basically just a cute girls doing cute things show about a girl who is a bit clumsy but has big dreams and tries very hard to be a track star! It's completely inoffensive and periodically cute/charming but much less outrageous that its synopsis might suggest.



Gun Gale Online is the season's Sword Art Online spinoff written by the author of the Kino's Journey novels. The first episode just sort of felt like watching an anime flavored match of PUBG but it settled into something more solid in episode two. Nothing too much to write home about here but it does have an intriguing main character and is a solidly executed competition focused anime.

I can't claim to be overly familiar with all but the broad outlines of the source material or original anime but I've quite been enjoying the reboot of Legend of the Galactic Heroes for my seasonal dose of Grandiose Space Politics. Despite needing to fill some big shoes the show has stepped out of the gate pretty confidently, showing competence in making sure the viewer understands the spatial layout of potentially confusing space battles in its first two episodes and establishing the show's human stakes and political intrigues in its third. It's also a good example of an anime in which CGI actually complements rather than detracts from the experience, with some very nicely modeled ships.

Last Period is a bit like Konosuba but without the isekai element and its a perfectly charming little comedy with an appealing bright art style. The show is loosely based on a mobile game but mines many (though not all by any means) of its jokes from translating those games' rather exploitative progression mechanics into an actual fantasy setting to the eternal despair of our protagonists, which I suppose one could read as either self-awareness or cynicism on the part of its creators. The OP and ED are both very cute and catchy, with the latter featuring the show's standout characters, its endearingly dorky villains.




Magical Girl Ore runs on the core joke of "what if being a magical girl meant transforming into a hugely buff dude" and decently succeeds at mining that for all its worth. The show is definitely better when it leans full into absurdism, piling on a dozen overlapping love triangles and the like, the third episode tried to be sincere for a bit in its first half and it just wasn't working out so well. A solid but inessential comedy.

There's also Aggretsuko on Netflix, a series of 15 minute shorts (adapted from a previous three minute series by the same web-animator) about a red panda office worker and her daily travails with corporate drudgery, office sexism and social failure. It's pretty entertaining, at times insightful and slightly less depressing than it sounds. Though I'm not sure if it's good sign when cute mascot companies look at the market and realize they need to account for the "extreme existential despair" demographic.

I am super glad im not watching Darling in the Franxx

I've been watching Record of Lodoss War today and am halfway through. It's obviously based on a tabletop RPG campaign since the main characters, despite having differing agendas, keep sticking together for no damned reason. I mean, why did the elf even join them in the first place? The protagonists also keep getting into dangerous situations at convenient intervals and their antagonist seemingly does nothing else besides obsess over the heroes and send low level minions to attack them, despite obviously having the power to crush them in one blow. I guess it's neat to see all the fantasy stuff that you have to imagine when you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, but this show kind of just goes from encounter to encounter without a main plot that holds it together well enough.

I was expecting GGO to just be average or solid but it turned out to be a total blast from the third or so episode onward and one of my favorites of the season, the fun cast and it's total dedication to being incredibly outrageously stupid in a very particular action movie shlock kind of way were too much fun.

Attack on Titan, not so bad.

PSYCHO-PASS has a pretty rad opening

I’m very partial to the Tonegawa OP. One of my favourite this year.

Well, that TV critic actually answered me. Now I feel bad about that comment on his appearance. Basically he subscribes to a crapton of streaming services, including Crunchyroll, and had heard of A Place Further Than The Universe thanks to impassioned blog posts and comments by fans. So essentially he found out about the show because it's his job to find out about shows like it.

What are you using to stream? I thought that companies only wanted anime streaming for outside Japan so as to have fans buy overpriced Blurays.

Nah,I just remember reading that Crunchyroll and Funimation are blocked in Japan, when they're probably how the majority of overseas fans watch current anime. I just thought it was an odd split in anime consumption methods, especially since the studios are well aware how much money streaming can make them since I think Crunchyroll in particular bids on every series that comes out.

Sub-titled! It is a great series by the way. Well thought out and actually has a good ending.. 

I tried getting into Carole & Tuesday but just couldn't. I love pretty much everything else Shinichiro Watanabe does so it feels weird to finally have something that just doesn't do anything for me. This one just seemed so anachronistic and twee, and it was trying too hard to namedrop brands and companies. At this point, I can't even figure out why they went with a futuristic angle on it other than that they could. Sure, it looks pretty, but I almost feel like this is an increasingly easy test to pass in animation. And sure, the show seems to have a point about how packaged the music industry is, but nothing it was saying felt really ground breaking or particularly insightful or subversive. Maybe I will give it a go sometime in the future, but for me its currently a pass.

Yep, pretty much.  so far Mars is just background and an excuse to put a few gadgets in. Mars is also totally terraformed to pretty much look like Earth so things like the environment being harsh or resource scarcity didn't factor in at all to any of the episodes I saw.  Its an odd choice since the the setting brings neither constraints to add weight to the drama nor new freedoms to let the story go in more interesting directions. It could have as easily been simply set in a near-future Earth (say 2050) in some random Neo-somewhere and worked just as well.  

How the hell did you make it all the way through Bleach?