You can raise your hand if you had High Card and Mononogatari getting second seasons on your anime bingo card, but I doubt I’d believe you.  At least it explains why the exposition with this one seemed glacially slow.  As I noted several times I had an overwhelming sense Mononogatari was barely skimming the surface, giving us the merest taste of its premise in these 12 episodes.  Knowing there’s another 12 (or so) to follow certainly makes that a lot easier to explain. Especially given thee new reality, I’ve gotten to the point where I quite like what this show is doing.  ..read more

Episode posts when in travel mode are always a challenge for me, but especially where a series like Vinland Saga is concerned.  This is always a densely-packed series both in terms of ideas and plot, and demands serious analysis and reflection which I don’t have to give this episode.  That said, at least this ep was the most straightforward of the season in some ways.  It doesn’t go into the usual “semi-ending” mode cour-finishing episodes of multi-season anime often do, but it still represents a pretty clear transition point in the story.  Nothing after this is going to ..read more

The Yamashita Daiki so long tour continues, as he signs off both his signature characters (for now) this weekend.  It would be hard to overstate just how much Yamashita (who also has great range, as he showed in Dance Dance Danseur) imbues both these lads with the essence of his personality.  Onoda Sakamichi and Midoriya Izuku are more different than one might think at first glance, but more than anything what unites them is their kindness and their loyalty.  We saw Deku drift away from that a bit this season, but Sakamichi has never wavered for an instant (apart from that ..read more

This is one of those cases I was talking about a few days ago, where I was watching an episode thinking it was a finale only to realize by the end that there’a another ep coming (it’s kind of odd to finish a winter series in April, but oh, well).  Whatever the case it will only be a tap on the pause button – TMR will continue until the manga is completely adapted, irrespective of how long the season breaks are.  And with the manga done, it really comes down to the production committee’s discretion about how long it all takes. Tokyo Revengers is quite a weird series, to be sure.&nb ..read more

The sixth season of the best Weekly Shounen Jump series of its generation comes to a close, with a seventh already booked.  That Boku no Hero Academia is the best seems is clear-cut to me, among the battle shounen anyway.  A more complicated question is whether this was the best season of HeroAca.  I’m inclined to think so.  There are individual cours that could give it a run for its money, but in my view no other season has been as consistently superb from start to finish.  Every season has made the LiA year-end Top Ten (though S5 needed weak competition to do i ..read more

Here are a couple things I know after almost 12 years of writing about anime: There are times when I’m simply not going to agree with the general zeitgeist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. When it comes to the very popular – be they writers, studios, or something else – very often my favorites are among their least popular works. I don’t know if it’s fair to talk about Urobuchi Gen as if he were a power player in anime these days – his name doesn’t have the cachet it used to.  But he’s written some extremely powerful and influential stuff – influential to the point where ..read more

In the realm of being a romcom fan, it seems to me that few phrases pack as much weight as “I really love these two idiots”.  The side characters here are great, don’t get me wrong.  They’re pivotal to the main plot in a really smart way, and interesting in their own right.  I’d even go so far as to say Carol’s arrival was the catalyst for the chemical reaction that made Tomo-chan really click as a show.  But Tomo and Jun are the whole point of this exercise for me, and ultimately the reason why I’ve come to love it as much as I have.  It’s going to suck when it end ..read more

Two main thoughts here, as I crank out another Tsurune post that will go largely unnoticed.  I may not love (or even like) everything Kyoto Animation does, but they’re a goddam force of nature.  No other studio can consistently make me feel so deeply just with the art and animation.  Also, Tsurune is by no means a great show.  Frankly, it can be relatively pedestrian a good chunk of the time in terms of writing.  But it almost always nails the big moments, which is a good quality to have.  And it sure as hell nailed this one. That’s the tweet, really.  ..read more

There have been a few occasions recently when I’ve assumed I was watching a series finale, only to realize at the end that there was another episode to come.  With Koori Zokusei Danshi to Cool na Douryou Joshi it was just the opposite – for some reason I remembered it being 13 episodes.  It was pretty clear by the time Himuro-kun and Fuyutsuki-san got to that riverbank that this was it, though.  And with a series like Koori Zokusei that’s a shame, because I have a lot of affection for it.  It’s no masterpiece, but one of those shows you look forward to spending time w ..read more

I rather liked this episode, but it’s a reminder that Mononogatari feels very much like an unfinished product.  I’ve always had the sense that this adaptation was never doing more than skimming the surface of the source material.  That suggests the source material itself might have a lot to offer, but it’s unlikely we’re ever going to see much of it realized in anime form.   A classic “read the manga” ending seems inevitable, but I suppose we’ll wait another week before making the final call on that one. This time around the MacGuffin is Hyouma going to collect a special ..read more