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Well I started watching Usagi Drop since well... I was bored and I didn't know what to do... and I didn't want to surf around and find a good anime to watch. So I was like "why not try Usagi Drop? A lot of people are saying it's good and it has great ratings." And well, so far I'm enjoying it a lot. Now that I'm caught up... I now have 3 animes I always look forward to every week [Usagi Drop, Fairy Tail, and Nichijou]. Now I have to find another anime since I'm all caught up...

I forgot to mention in my last post that I had watched Animation Runner Kuromi and Animation Runner Kuromi 2 on ANN on the day that they were to expire. I watched both in the English dub; I would've watched the Japanese version too for completeness, but I had waited to long and had other things to do that day.

I enjoyed both. They were cute and fun™. That's inoffensively generic praise, but it fits and it felt so good. Both are well crafted conventionality; their stories, characters and style fit like comfortable old slippers. Before them, the only other work of Akitaro Daichi that I had seen was Now and Then, Here and There, which I did not expect this to resemble, although the director's deftness in portraying and evoking emotion is evident in both in what are obviously very different ways. The premise and events are very familiar ones that happen much as one would expect. There isn't ever much tension, although I felt a touch of uncertainty as to the end of both. Despite that, Akitaroh Daichi knows so well how to do these commonplace things that I found myself reacting to them just as I was meant to. It also has the benefit of very appealing and likeable characters who are as much archetypes as the events of the story are standard, but portrayed deftly enough that it succeeds, perhaps even beating its modest ambitions. I especially liked the taciturn, slightly abrasive, subtly melancholy Hamako Shihonmatsu. I also enjoyed the way that it operates as a sort of children's-book explanation of how animation is made, which is presumably portrayed accurately in its process and pressures. I, typically enough, really liked the English version too. the voice work is slightly broad, but that fits the lightly cartoonish feel of the episodes and the cast sounds energetic. I liked the voice portrayal of Hamako Shihonmatsu as well as I did her character; it sounds like the same actress in both episodes, but a different actress is listed for each, so either Carol Jacobanis is an uncanny mimic or in fact the same person as Suzy Prue.

More recently, I watched Casshern Sins on Hulu. I was encouraged to watch it by Erin Finnegan ardently decrying both halves of the series, not as some stupid act of indignity, but because some of her complaints were against things that I find appealing. I like bleak. I don't know what heavy object was dropped on what part of my brain, but it is the way that I am. I really wanted to like it too. It has a ruined, thinly inhabited setting of grim grey, black and brown beauty that is relentlessly decaying, pervasive bracing bleakness, a moody atmosphere, unhurried pace, distinctive artwork, some intellectual ambition and a desire to be bittersweet and elegiac. That's damned near what one might get if trying to make a bespoke series for me, but I was mostly frustrated by it. Some of the complaints from Shelf Life rang true, especially those about repetition. After a while I started to expect somebody to start explaining what a Shikabane Hime was. What really defeated me, however, was that Casshern himself seemed tedious. I just couldn't find much interest or real depth in his discontents; they aren't examined in any real arc, at least not in one that I could discern. He alternated among different mopes, then at some point didn't anymore. The first half of the series is too aimless. There are a few good stories, I enjoyed the one about the worker at an abandoned factor who wanted a bell for her tower, but there's not feeling of progress like what I'd want from a show about a central character's inner struggles to tie them together. None of the characters or events from the first half are returned to or mentioned again in the second half, which disappointed me. I did like the last episode; it pressed a bit too much into its allotted time and overplayed its hand a little, but it had much of the right sense of feeling.

I found the series' effort to ruminate on the relationship between the value of life and immortality pretty irritating. I'm usually pretty agreeable to the sensibility that it expressed, but for most of the time, I found it preposterous. I wish that there had been more of Leda and Braiking Boss. They were potentially interesting antagonists, although Leda went off the rails a few times, straying from her Lady MacBeth part in a storyline that doesn't really go very many places into some weird, abrupt fixation on vanity (Real line of dialogue: “but I will be the one to gain eternal beauty, because I am the woman!”) The antagonist who is given the most attention is Dio, who is substantially just evil Casshern. I didn't care for Dio. There is too little to him and indeed to the antagonist's side of the story beside agonizing over Casshern.

Nevertheless, I feel like I might have missed some things or misread them, so I think that I might revisit it some time in the future. I still sort of want to like Casshern Sins (Like Mike Toole did).

Even more recently, I more or less concurrently watched Le Chevalier D'Eon on DVD and Air Master on FUNImation.com. The two are very different.

I had become a little bit uneasy about Le Chevalier D'Eon because of my natural talent at ruining my own fun and some lukewarm opinions recently found in this very thread. That fretting, however, was not vindicated. I enjoyed Le Chevalier D'Eon a lot. I was intrigued and arrested from the beginning; by the middle of the Russia arc I was intensely eager for each new episode; by the England arc I had to restrain myself from trying to watch more than one volume in a night. Le Chevalier D'Eon is a cannily written historical thriller with a dense, complicated plot, lively pacing and many impressive moments that stick in memory. As fond as I am of calm, moody pacing, as evident in my liking the whole Bee Train girls-with-guns trilogy, I do love a thickly told story that move at a more thrilling clip. The series has lavish historical detail. The characters wear carefully portrayed and elaborate clothes while moving amidst impressive backgrounds. The animation is reliable and impressive when it needs to be. The sword duels are rather exciting and have interestingly careful choreography. The faces of the characters are a bit bland and sometimes too homogenous. The more realistic, angular and more western style of the faces also seemed technically problematic given how awkwardly distorted they sometimes became when trying to express exuberant emotion.

I was surprised at the historical fidelity of the story; much of it is wildly ahistorical and often in pretty bonkers ways, most of the events and characters happened in the more mundane true history. The characters surprised me as well. I expected them to be and remain pretty flat throughout the story; this kind of things thrives more upon its story, tending to leave its characters clearly, but simply defined. The characters of Le Chevalier D'Eon aren't the most intricate or deepest, but they acquired more life and variety than I expected them too.

This series builds to breathless intensity as it nears its end, which is something of a strike against it, because the thick farrago that this ends up as seems like it could have been resolved slightly more satisfyingly with more time. The decisive climax is a little abrupt, but not really missing anything. The coda is very compact and hits all of the vital notes, but I wish that there had been at least an episode 25 and 26 to let everything breathe more deeply.

I expect that I will watch Le Chevalier D'Eon again; it's the sort of show that lends itself to review. I am pretty sure that I'll find some things that I overlooked before and find new significance in others.

I wonder if this show sold less well than ADV expected. The first three volumes have escalating numbers of extra features, including a terrifically surreal series of pictures of the leads from the English dub in drag, including David Matranga with hilariously heavy eyeshadow, but the last three volumes have just their historical notes atop the standard features. The encyclopedia indicates that 2,050 people have seen it. That's not sales data, but it's the best that I have at hand and it suggests that it wasn't the success that they had hoped. That's a shame, but I'm not surprised.

As for Air Master; I'm surprised to say that I really liked it. I'm not fond of 'fighting anime' and that's really all that there is to Air Master. There's a story, but it's very simple. There is some character work, but it's familiar and straightforward, if not absent. Maki's 'entourage' never does much and the series seem to forget about them after a while. Well, the series forgot about a lot of things that it had introduced in the first half, then had to rush to reintegrate some of them as it stumbled to its end while brushing the rest aside. One character seemed important, but disappeared at some point that I can't remember, was briefly mentioned at the end, but nothing else.

I think that I liked it because the fights were reliably brutal and often could muster some novelty or spectacle and because Maki Aikawa was towering, physically robust and expressively plain-faced. She nearly made sense as the preposterously able combatant that she was and only failed to make perfect sense because nobody can make perfect sense in a series like this. I don't think a single short or skirt was shredded and even though the lead wears a skirt while fighting in a style oriented around wild leaping, there weren't very many views of her underwear with none of those provided being sexualized. She kicks people and it appears to hurt in a pretty palpable way. The fights also usually restrain themselves to physical attacks. When some ki-using nonsense and a stupid ninja intrude later it's disappointing, but at least in the latter case Maki has a satisfyingly blunt solution to the problem.

My favorite character wasn't the lead, swell though she was, but her not-really rival Kaori Sakiyama, an aspiring supermodel who is obsessed with defeating Maki (spoiler[she never even comes close]). She could have been a vain, arrogant nuisance, but the fact that she goes to tremendous effort to try to attain her goal and is just so relentlessly persistent that she's endearing and admirable. The relationship that she develops with Maki is surprisingly interesting for so simple an a series. It's not very complicated, but it's better than it should have been.

The last two episodes tried to seal things up, but they didn't really work out in the way that finales for things that have outrun an ongoing manga usually don't.

Oh, and I hate Renge. Please, make the memory of her go away.

Last edited by ailblentyn on Thu Sep 15, 2011 2:58 pm; edited 1 time in total

I think "cute and fun" is a good description of Kuromi-chan. What's good about the shows is that they succeed in being those things. Nothing wrong with some fun!

I finished Living For the Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed. As nice a piece of emotional, sappy seinen fare as I've seen (with just a pinch of of let's-check-out-the-magically-well-endowed-12-yr-old sleaze for savour). At least I assumed seinen was the appropriate label. Wikipedia labels the magazine that ran the manga as shounen, so I don't know. Anyway, with that polished off, I'm ready to power through Sailor Moon S. Hooray!

(By the way, something I at no point bought in Living was the idea that child Karada was 12 years old. As if! She was drawn to look about 4.)

Edit: After watching the first ep of Sailor Moon S, I'm very excited. Visually it's bold and stylish. And talk about a hard-hitting opening episode! When spoiler[Tuxedo Kamen was actually incapacitated by the monster of the week,] I sat up and and exclaimed "Oh my goodness!" The series is promising to break its own rules, which should be wonderful.

It's just the mood I'm in...

After watching Big Wind Up and Cross Game (for the 4th time in a little over a year) I still wasn't satisfied. So onto one of Japan's most popular and highest rated series ever, Touch. I've only watched the first episode and while it has that rough style of the mid-80's it looks like it could be a good series... only 100 more to go. I wonder if it'll last me through the playoffs?

The series I'm following right now:

Natsume Yuujinchou San - Is it bad to ask for a fourth season? Not many shows get so many sequels. It's fun to watch Natsume's bonds with his friends get deeper. I wonder if spoiler[he'll be able to tell his foster parents and other friends that he can see youkai.] The high quality of this series is very consistent, I can only recall one episode this season (with the fox IIRC) where some drawings felt off.
Usagi Drop - I still have to see the last episode, but that has to wait for tomorrow, because it's too late for that now. I liked this show.
Naruto Shippuuden - Hm, while Rock Lee's filler episode was funny, I want the main story to get rolling again. But I'll be waiting patiently. Enough other series to watch in the mean time.

Rurouni Kenshin - Wait, what's that old title doing here? I sometimes read comments about an epic Kyoto arc or somethin' and the show has good ratings. It's about samurai (love some action), friends, adventure, it has some comedy and a slight hint of romance... I was interested.
The show already had me in it's grasp in it's very first episode. The age of the show doesn't bother me at all. After Kenshin moved in Kaoru's house, the next episodes are mostly dedicated to spoiler[introducing characters who become friends with Kenshin and Kaoru.] It has different arcs with spoiler[each some nice villains, but rarely gets really serious - most arcs end with some kind of 'and they live happily ever after' - feeling Wink

.] I liked the first season very much, but was wanting for more serious action and drama. It was even a bit too generic at times.
Then, in episode 28 spoiler[- the title 'Kyoto Arc' appears. Suddenly the atmosphere changes! More and better action+animation, a story that lasts longer than three episodes] (I'm now at episode 30) spoiler[and a very difficult choice for Kenshin to make: will he return to be the guy he once was? Before it wasn't even a question, but now... okay, he won't kill anyone.] Right? Right...? I'm curious how the series will handle this situation. Anyway, I'm very excited right now. And I have to go to bed. Meh Sad

.

[EDIT: No listing or one-liners. Put reasons WHY you're watching. -TK]

Tried out Baccano! and I adore the characters so much! I'm also a sucker for time periods like this in America, so combined with that, its becoming one of my favorites. Wonderful chemistry of the cast, and I hope this lasts for the rest of the series. Story unfolds little by little, but characters won me more, so don't mind that.

The only fault is some gore here and there, but that's more on me than the show. Can't remember alot of the names but, my favorites are spoiler[that "couple" who robs, Ladd, Jaccazi(sp?), and a few more I can't describe at the moment].

I am watching Usagi Drop because previously I watched Ghost in the Shell 2nd GIG and Durarara! and I wanted something more realistic.

The current Best Rivals tournament got me thinking about past tourneys, and so I decided to watch every series that has so far won a tourney. I just finished watching Kurau: Phantom Memory today, whose two main characters won the Best Duos tourney, and it was fabulous! It's an excellent blend of action and emotion, with great animation. One of the most interesting aspects (besides the interaction of the two main characters) are some of the villains, who each with their varying degrees of gray remind me of Miyazaki antagonists.

Also, still watching Detective Conan. With 200 episodes to go, I doubt I'll ever be caught up =]

Helped by the fact that my internet was out and I couldn't watch anything current I've gotten through through the first part of Touch (27 episodes) in these past couple days. It is also true that is has the same compulsive nature of Cross Game (gaotta see whats next!-even if I know what's coming!)

Between knowing the usual pattern of these shows, being particularly familiar with CG, and judging the characters, I knew exactly what the climax of this first part would be within the first couple episodes. But it was done very well- it still had the desired effect on me.

Well, there are some things that bugged me or I assume will be improved upon as the story goes forward, such as
-the highly anonymous nature of the majority of the baseball team.
-Minami's rather shallow wish to be taken to the Koshien, it's not like she should really care, she's so ignorant of the game she doesn't even know not to jinx a no-hitter. Of course, she has a better reason now. I guess it could be excused that that all three are just ridiculous contentious people, all three trying to do the best for the others whether it what they really want or not.
-Call me mean but, I do not like the dog.
- the chosen manner of the climax event- a cliche so nice they did it twice. The exact same thing happened to spoiler[the rival pitcher's father.] Sure, this is an 80's show and the cliche isn't as old as it is now but to do the exact same thing that apparently leads to almost the exact same result seems like really poor writing ([spoiler]I a had a somewhat macabre thought that they'd use a train instead- but was leaning more towards sudden illness or disastrous sports injury[). They also throw in a couple too many guilt trips that will cause people to think "If only I..."/spoiler]

Well, I'll take a break to watch the current season shows now but I doubt it'll take me long to finish this show up, I'm enjoying it and will probably enjoy it even more now that they'll probably focus even more on baseball.

I'm a little sheepish to admit it, but I watched Venus Versus Virus, probably because it aims fairly clearly 'down-market' from my age. That show somehow became a sort of mindworm for me; I don't know how I even heard of it, but despite the only mildly interesting premise, lack of enthusiasm in most reviews and my own only slightly approving reaction to the two episodes that I watched on Funimation's website, I couldn't exorcise the idea of getting it, so I did.

It's an entertaining enough show that I don't mind having spent some time on it. The characters are easy to like and the story serviceable, though familiar, but nothing is very exceptional and it doesn't seem very well assembled. I think that the producers had too few episodes for the content, because there's little sense of building to development in the characters and it felt as though there was supposed to be more in the story that had to be elided for lack of time. That at least meant that the story kept to a brisk clip through the whole thing, so it was a touch breezy, but at least always lively.

There's a sort of thinness to a lot of the concepts in the story and the scope of the events doesn't feel momentous enough for how dramatic their consequences could be. Despite a lot of awkward exposition, the series' mythology and mechanics didn't seem very richly detailed. Sumire and Lucia were enjoyable characters, Sumire being plausibly uncertain and terrified by what she's been thrust into while Lucia was deeply cold and abrasive, but both changing in good, if rather familiar, ways as it went on, but in neither case, but especially Sumire's, did their emotional development seem to happen as gradually and naturalistically as would have been best. I liked them the whole way through, but I feel that that could have happened in a deeper way. The series has limited depth of mind, it never does, for example, try to take advantage of what could be a potent metaphor in the fact that spoiler[Sumire must shoot herself, often in the head, to enter her 'berserker' state]. Lucia's warming up seemed, at least, more convincing and effective, but only takes an escalating number of subtle smiles and shows of tender humanity. The villains weren't much to speak of for the most part. There's a character who looks like evil Sarah Palin who never did much but be shadowy and menacing. I didn't find the ending quite satisfying; the ambiguity isn't a real fault, just what built up to it; it didn't feel intense enough, especially because too much had to be narrated and hand-waved through that would ideally have been portrayed. Venus Versus Virus wasn't too much to look at. The character designs were pleasing and distinctive enough, but the animation was never remarkable, being sometimes less than that, and the action choreography mostly wasn't very interesting to me. I somehow look fondly upon it even so and don't at all mind having watched it.

The mindworm is banished, at a small cost too, so I doubt that I'll ever watch it again, but this is as much as anything because the artbox is a very tight fit for the individual volumes, so it would take some trouble to dislodge them.

Tris8 wrote:

The current Best Rivals tournament got me thinking about past tourneys, and so I decided to watch every series that has so far won a tourney. I just finished watching Kurau: Phantom Memory today, whose two main characters won the Best Duos tourney, and it was fabulous! It's an excellent blend of action and emotion, with great animation. One of the most interesting aspects (besides the interaction of the two main characters) are some of the villains, who each with their varying degrees of gray remind me of Miyazaki antagonists.

I've recently become curious about Kurau: Phantom Memory after having happened upon the trailer on a disc of Le Chevalier D'Eon. It looked promising and I enjoyed the three episodes that I sampled on Hulu. I'm curious to see how the relationship between Kurau and Christmas develops. I seem to fall for strongly emotional stories and Kurau seems like a good protagonist, so intend to buy it soon.

Watching Kara no Kyōkai - the Garden of sinners right now. I haven't build up a strong opinion about it yet. It's been pretty good, but it hasn't really caught my attention. I've seen 5 movies so far and I still don't know who the antogonist is. spoiler[Is Shiki supposed to be the antogonist?] I don't get it. This last one I saw (5th movie) was VERY confusing and long. Two hours may not sound that long for a movie, but it felt a lot longer than that, and all I knew what was going on was that the guy with the coolest japanese voice spoiler[was the baddie and he had to die.] I didn't understand Touko at all. spoiler[I mean she had a double? Was it a puppet? And did anyone notice that she apperently had two identical cars? Where on earth did she get the money to afford two Astons anyway?]

The whole anime has been a bit confusing anyway. The movies aren't in a correct chronological timeline which is confusing and annoying. I've never really understood the idea of that anyway in any anime, movie or a tv series. Well Shiki has cool eyes and the fight scenes are pretty nice as is the animation in a whole.

After finishing the First and Second Stage TV series, along with the Third Stage movie, I've started watching Initial D: Fourth Stage. It's been an entertaining series, overall, but I've found the characters so stock and cliché that it's taken a bit of my enjoyment out of watching it. Mogi's spoiler[surprising promiscuity (for an anime, anyway)] was a nice touch, though.

At the end of the day, it's good solid fun ... and has made me want my next car to be manual, LOL!!!

Laughing

Rating: Good

@ Spastic Minnow: Is the dog such an important character then Wink

? I enjoyed Cross Game a lot, maybe I'll give Touch a chance in the future.

I forgot to mention I'm also following Hanasaku Iroha. Worse, I forgot to watch it yesterday! I do like it, but not always. I don't know... bit mixed feelings. The series gave a wrong first impression, not because the first episode was bad (I loved it!), but because it didn't tell you what you were really in for. You think Ohana will have to struggle to get on better terms with the rest of the cast, some sort of drama with sad moments and setbacks etc. Instead, she makes best friends pretty quick and the show's more a blend of happy, sometimes pervy, goofy and some mature themes at the same time.
The animation is superb, that's without question. Now to watch the last episode. EDIT: eh, not the last, that one's coming up next week.

Usagi Drop: Like others have said, the last episode didn't have a lot of new material, but it was a fitting ending.

Rurouni Kenshin: Loooving it. Not really much to say, but the Kyoto Arc is indeed good. End of report.

A Mystery wrote:

@ Spastic Minnow: Is the dog such an important character then Wink

? I enjoyed Cross Game a lot, maybe I'll give Touch a chance in the future.

He's the show's version of Nomo. But considering your avatar you may not be happy to know I don't really like Nomo much either. I'm not really sure why I dislike them, I guess I just find them a bit obnoxious, mascot characters that just try too hard- and Punch (the dog) is more obnoxious than Nomo ever was.

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