* Not objective ** Not comprehensive It’s been a good number of years since I’ve watched enough yearly anime to make an annual retrospective post make sense, but it finally happened. Not only did I watch a good amount of seasonal anime, but I also have checked out a fair few older shows for the first time, leading to a very healthy anime diet (at least as healthy as metaphorically eating anime can be). That said, I didn’t feel I watched enough to make a proper top anime of 2023 list, so instead you’ll just get some categorical short reflections on various moments and shows from the year. I ho ..read more

Something I’ve been considering almost since the start of Bocchi the Rock! is the central source of the show’s comedy and how that intersects with a compassionate understanding of mental health. Whenever you have a story that wants to mine a character’s struggles (in whatever form) for laughs, inevitably it raises the question of whether the humor is coming from a place of understanding or cruelty. And thus, the question: Is Bocchi the Rock! mean to Bocchi? I’ll start off by saying, I don’t think so. While the reality is that Bocchi probably needs counseling more than she needs the affirmatio ..read more

A few months ago, I told a friend I was getting back into watching seasonal anime. Although it’s something that sounds a bit like a joke, I was serious. After about a year and a half away from the seasonal grind, I finally found the desire to watch things again—and how I was rewarded! These are the best anime of the summer 2022 season. 6. Engage Kiss Regrettably, I was informed that Engage Kiss, from the writer who brought you Classroom Crisis (good), Saekano (good but also bad), and White Album 2 (…), is getting another cour. This is unfortunate because Engage Kiss does not in any way deserv ..read more

Ah, teenagers. After three engrossing episodes focused on individual characters, the fourth episode of Yesterday wo Utatte splitting its focus between Shinako and Rou felt like a bit of a letdown. It’s not that Yesterday isn’t capable of dealing with more than one characters’ headspace at the same time—episode 3 gave us of some of that with Rikuo, after all. Rather, it’s that Rou’s issues, compared to the more “adult” concerns of the other three, feel more mundane. Rikuo has his relatable self-sabotaging attitudes and habits, adrift in the world without a plan or purpose. Shinako’s spinning h ..read more

Never expected to be saying this after last week’s rough going, but that was rather pleasant (in the end), wasn’t it? I was kind of expecting Yesterday wo Utatte to pivot to letting us see a little bit more into Haru this week given the fact that Rikuo had his moment in the premiere and Shinako took focus last week. Giving us a relatively objective look at the three main characters through their own headspace and lives was always needed to happen to prepare a solid foundation for the story going forward, and that’s what we’ve now got. For my part, I’d like to see this kind of rotation maintai ..read more

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but misery’s one that could rival it. Two episodes in, I think it’s fair to classify Yesterday wo Utatte (Sing “Yesterday” for Me) as a visual marvel. At least as far as anime go, that’s all it’s needed to establish itself as a show not only beautiful as an aesthetic piece, but also wonderfully and delicately functional in storytelling terms. Last week, I was musing over the script’s efficiency. Although I was once again deeply impressed by how much ground Yesterday covered in 23 minutes without ever feeling rushed, the concise competence of the ..read more

A short post on the fun of enjoying the extremely awful main character of The Millionaire Detective Balance: Unlimited (Fugou Keiji). In my little corner of the anime community, the extremely wealthy are not well liked. To put it gently, we tend to perceive rich people as symbolic of a broken economic system, one that allows a small number of people to acquire assets far beyond what is reasonably needed for a good standard of living while others live in abject poverty. This is a reason that popular superheroes like Iron Man and Batman have fallen out of favor—their first superpowers, after al ..read more

A quite reasonable reason to get back into watching anime more regularly, I’d say. As you may remember, back in January I said that I was going to be getting back into watching seasonal anime—and, supposedly, writing about anime in general a bit more. Well, I’ve done the watching part, although the writing bit’s lagged behind somewhat. Let’s rectify that imbalance a bit today! Take One—The Real Good Stuff We’ve got three shows that I would put in this category from the past season: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, In/Spectre, and Bofuri. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (8/10 ..read more

I’m just happy about this thing—and I hope I have more reason to be in the future! At about the ten-minute mark of the first episode of Yesterday wo Utatte (Sing “Yesterday” for Me), I was starting to feel like the episode was getting ready to close, so I took a quite look at the time. 10 minutes. That’s how long it took this premiere to cover what felt like a single episode’s worth of content—and then it just kept going and going and going until it finally ended with Rikuo snapping Haru’s picture. In an episode completely hung up on a near-past that feels inescapable, it seems as if that p ..read more

In which soldiers do un-soldier-like things. In Sora no Woto, all five of the main characters are soldiers. Despite the comfortable, relatively untroubled lives they lead from day to day, reminders of their past and current realities of military service are always present. But presence isn’t the same as prominence, and you could be forgiven for forgetting that Seize’s remote bastion is an army outpost. Festivals, local crafts and trade, and the lighthearted, mundane tasks of peace-time duties pass by almost blissfully, only occasionally puncuated by exercises of a more urgent character ..read more