Category: Anime Reviews

If I said that a really good comedy for the past year was a show about a Penguin and a Panda walking into a bar, would you believe me?

Polar Bear Cafe is an interesting beast here. Series that combine slice of life with comedy are nothing new, but this series does it in a way that has not been done often before. For one, its characters stand apart in their simplicity,and how they try to stay away from often used cliches. One, by being a bunch of talking animals, and two, by focusing not on teenagers, but on the working class adults.

Most humour in anime is energetic. Polar Bear Cafe though, is all about deadpan. If you enjoy that kind of humour, then you should give this show a chance, because on one hand, it contains really every day conversations between its characters, and on the other hand it is really creative in how it delivers its jokes. It constantly pokes fun at itself and its silly concept and contains more running jokes than you can shake a stick at. The self-referential humour is what I liked best about this series: it spends so much time carefully creating its setting, yet at the same it’s also constantly breaking it down and poking fun at it.

50 episodes is long, but I have to say: during the best episodes I really fell off my chair laughing. For me, they were the Penko episode, and the Bar MC episode. Beyond that this series also made me laugh numerous times, but there were unfortunately also plenty of episodes that failed to raise a laugh, or that were just plain dull. Like I said, 50 episodes is long.

It’s a bit of a dilemma for this series. Ideally its length would be at 39 episodes, but the long length does lead to some really good character building. At the end of the series, you really feel like you know these characters. The “people” you see hanging around in bars, cafes that you sometimes talk to and hang out with. The ones who are constantly trolling each other, who don’t try to get others to like them, yet get their charms from that.
One-Sentence Review: Random slice of life combined with deadpan comedy: that’s what makes this show work although it is too long with 50 episodes; plus Polar Bear is a great character.
Suggestions:
– Excel Saga
– Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki
– Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru

Kyoani. I really respect… your animators. They are able to put in so much detail into their drawings and movements and your anime have much more dynamic movement in them than the competition. Now, would you start making interesting series again? Pretty please?

At this point I’ve already written off Shaft: these guys will just repeat their style over and over unless a really good writer like Urobuchi Gen or something makes them do otherwise. Tamako Market however was for me the final chance I’d give for Kyoani’s slice of life series: if I didn’t like this one, I’d just stop bothering with them. So yeah, at this time I have lost my patience for the as well: I’m not going to give them any more chances. If something like Hyouka appears again, it’ll be obvious that it’s different and interesting right from the start.

Tamako Market did have the best first episode of the new season. It showed a lot of different characters, ranging from high school girls, high school boys, shop owners, adults, families, an eccentric bird, young kids. It seemed so much more than the usual series that are just about a group of random high school girls.

In the end though, this potential never really got used. The shop owners never have any identity for themselves: they are all just lumped together into a collection of random stereotypes. The high school girls aside from Tamako also hardly have any personality aside from one trait. The talking bird got annoying right at the moment he gained weight. The high school boy’s only role in the series turned out to be having a crush on the lead female.

The family is the only part of the first episode that actually got any depth. The few moments the family was at the central focus, this series was at its best. The first half of the series spends most of its time on cultural references. That too was pretty interesting. In the second half though, the series gets overtaken by this really stupid marriage plot that really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s completely mindless, doesn’t really do anything, it’s not charming at all and was really annoying to get through to be honest.

So yeah, with this I’m done with Kyoani. Their series just aren’t for me. Wake me up when they start making something different.
One-Sentence Review: Really good and detailed animation for a slice of life series that doesn’t really go anywhere.
Suggestions:
– Aria the Animation
– Hyakko
– Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic Theater

Some seasons of anime are better than others, but the past winter season has hit a really low point. If you ignore the sequels, then it has been the worst season I ever blogged. Out of the series that did catch my attention enough, Kotoura-san turned out to be best. Not perhaps because it was the most consistent, but because it was the only show that really managed to stand out in a way. Yeah, it’s nothing special, but at least it’s something.

It’s especially the first and the last episode in this series that made sure of that. Perhaps they’re overdramatic at times, but the first episode plays really well with its mood-swings, making for a nice introduction, and the last episode wraps everything up nicely with a lot of character-development, making for a nice conclusion. Kotoura-san’s characters are by no means good or sophisticated; they’re all really simple teenagers without much depth. Still, they are genuine. That gave them a charm that I missed in all other non-sequels this season.

The series does have some big problems, though. You know the saying “it’s not about the destination, but about the journey”? Well that totally does not apply for Kotoura-san. I mentioned above that for Kotoura-san, it’s start and end are great. Inbetween though… it clearly had difficulties in filling everything in. This results in a pool episode, a beach episode, and a silly crime story that all feel really forced. The creators had some nice ideas for the characters, but they didn’t know what to do with them. Because of that the journey in this series can be really tedious because there really is not much interesting stuff going on. It also does not help that the antics of the bunch of perverts in this series gets annoying really fast. Still, it’s fun. It charmed and entertained me more than the other series this season.
One-Sentence Review: Kotoura-san is about mind-readers: it’s honest and genuine and that gives it a charm that makes it worth watching, despite the fact that it doesn’t know how to use half of its airtime…
Suggestions:
– B Gata H Kei
– Hitohira
– Mahou Tsukai Tai

I wanted to get this review out as soon as possible because… I have to apologize. I’m sorry. I endorsed this series when it first came out. I just didn’t know. I had no clue what kind of a trainwreck this would be. honestly!

Okay, so to start at the beginning: I actually liked Amnesia when it first started. It had a concept that really piqued my interest: the lead female wakes up not knowing anything, and suddenly she is dating this random guy with a weird fashion sense and she has no idea what’s going on. Over the course of the series she experiences this multiple times, each time dating a different guy. That had the potential to be a very interesting mystery-series with the right execution. It’s just… the execution was not right. Not right at all.

And yeah, the storytelling may be awkward and the animation may not be special and all, but those are just mere details. I called this a trainwreck, and I mean it. By far the biggest cause for that is the cast of characters.

Usually I try to avoid spoilers, but to get a good grasp of what went wrong I need to give some vague hints of what happens in the story. You see, this series at heart is a harem: over its course it shows the lead female together with a number of potential partners that it thinks appeal to its audience. Or at least, that’s supposed to be it. Regular harems work that way in any case. If Amnesia was based on the same principle then the creators have got a really low image of their target audience because, bar one, every single character in this show is a total prick.

Seriously, there are not many series that have so many unlikable characters in them. There is a murder suspect, a guy with bipolar disorder, an obsessive stalker, an incredibly whiny ladies’ man. The worst is the obsessive stalker. When I watched his episode, I had to do a double-take before I realized what the creators just pulled. I really have to restrain myself from just typing that out loud here. Let’s just say that every sane human being would just give him a kick in the groin at what he did there. The lead female just doesn’t do anything. Everything in this series gets done for her. And she doesn’t even realize it, just walking away happily as if she was the one who did all the work.

Oh, and as for the mystery part of the story… yeah. The final episode features an info-dump that has a good story buried somewhere underneath. But yeah, the final episode rushes through everything in order to stuff in all of the required exposition, which only ends up forced as hell.
One-Sentence Review: A series with interesting potential to finally be a good Otome Game adaptation… only to fail horribly with some of the worst characters imaginable.
Suggestions:
– Matantei Loki Ragnarok
– Saiunkoku Monogatari
– Ashita no Nadja
Note: with suggestions I mean series that worth watching if you liked Amnesia. NOT the other way around…

I have been putting this one off for way too long, but that’s not because I was looking up to reviewing it. Rather there was so much coming out that I instead wanted to cover, but I guess that I’d just wrap up this sequel that really improved a lot over its original series. The key for that was its plot, for once.

The first Jormungand series really was a build-up series: it’s there to introduce the characters, get the viewers a bit used to the world and concepts of this series. It could have done this better though, because it was too monotone, both in terms of stories and characters. Perfect Order drops the random stories, and instead is much more coherent, not to mention varied in both terms of content and characters.

The improvements first become visible with the characters. The first season was flawed because it had too many characters who were trying too hard to be snarky. The second season then commences to both introduce characters with significantly different personalities, as well as develop the current cast to go beyond their snarky self. Suddenly, a cast that was once bland sparkles with personality, just as I hoped.

The plot takes a while longer to show its trumps, but in the end, it actually does pay off with a number of really good plot twists. Not going to say when they show up, but let’s just say that the characters were preparing for a certain events for a very long while. It really impressed me in any case.

This is not one of those cases in which all of the build-up comes together, though: the plot twists themselves are really good, but the first season’s random stories remain rather… random, and just could have been done better. It’s really the writing that improved so much, but Jormungand as a whole is not a series that is perfectly paced or told, not to mention that even though the setting for this series is very original (taking place over the whole world and not just Japan, America and Europe), it just doesn’t feel real or relatable. There remain a few too many one-dimensional characters in this series, despite the added variety. Nevertheless though: very solid show. Including an awesome soundtrack.

Storytelling:	8.5/10 – Big improvement: things feel much more solid and coherent and it finally starts building up to something, with a great payoff.
Characters:	8.5/10 – A varied cast, that really shines in comparison to the bland cast of the first season.
Production-Values:	8.5/10 – Solid animation, but what really stands out here is the soundtrack. Again a big improvement in how it’s used.
Setting:	8/10 – Nice choice of locations, but it doesn’t make enough of an impact for a higher rating.

Suggestions:
– Black Lagoon
– Irresponsible Captain Tylor
– Seikai no Senki