Category: Anime Reviews

Kaleido Star is yet another example of why Gonzo can produce really outstanding series when they really want to. It first starts out as your average shoujo series about gymnastics and acrobatics, complete with ultra-talented female rival, a just as talented male potential love interest and another love male interest. And yet, with these ingredients it grew into everything a good shoujo series should be.

What made this series work so well is its excellent use of its 52 episodes. The first 26 episodes are already a very capable series by themselves. They show perfectly how Sora (the lead character) rises as a capable rival for Layla, emphasizing guts and hard work, never giving up, and including a number of plot twists that make sure to emphasize that not everything always happens in the lead character’s favour. Overall it’s a very satisfying story by itself, and then the second half of the series comes and pushes this development even further. The new characters of Leon and May really manage to get the best out of Sora in terms of development and make her into a really memorable character by the end of the series, and both of them also pretty impressive by themselves.

Since this is a series about acrobatics, performances also play a huge part in it. And while the creators didn’t have an unlimited budget, the animation does look really nice nonetheless. Especially the costume design for the different parts that are played throughout the series are top-notch, and the creators know exactly how to use their camera-angles and lighting effects to create a great show, based on still shots and close-ups.

If I had to mention a flaw in this series… then it lacks realism. Some of the moves that are performed by the characters are near-impossible, while at other times they master top-notch moves with only a week of training, not to mention that this is a series where seals turn into dogs. But really, the characters shine enough to make up for this flaw, and it never really gets in the way of what really is important for this series. Neither is the romance, by the way. When I first started watching this series, I was afraid that typical silly love triangles would develop over time, but the romance only appeared once in a while, and knew exactly that it shouldn’t get in the way of the characters.

So yes, this series deserves all of the praise it gets. Even though it’s got 52 episodes, every single one of them is dedicated somehow to pushing one of the characters forward, and I especially liked how much of an in-depth look it gave into the themes of working to your dreams and never giving up. It’s a wonderful series, definitely the product of Good Gonzo.

Matsumoto Leiji: the founder of the space opera genre. While his first work, Space Battleship Yamato, lacked a lot of polish, his next work, Captain Harlock, would feature an improvement in just about every aspect. This is the series that would define epic, and would provide inspiration for the many other space opera anime that would follow. Thank you Live-eviL, for having the patience to fully sub it.

While the set-up of the series is again simple (evil aliens known as the Mazone are attacking the earth, and Captain Harlock is the only one who can stop them with his battleship the Arcadia), this series knows how to use its 40 episodes very well. This isn’t a simple series where the Mazones just keep throwing monster after monster until they eventually die, but every episode serves to flesh out and develop the members of its cast, so that the end of the series closes off with both the good guys and the bad guys feeling complete.

Especially the Mazones and Captain Harlock provide to be more than capable of being the respective villains and hero of this series. While the Mazones are most definitely evil, this series makes them more than villains who are just evil for the sake of being evil. Harlock on the other hand stands far apart from your typical lead character. He’s a character who knows what his duty is, no matter what gets in his way, and after watching, I can really understand why Harlock managed to capture the hearts of many when it first aired.

But yeah, you really need patience in order to watch this. The best parts of this series only really start to shine in the final quarter of this series, and the building-up parts can be really nerve-wrecking at times. Especially the middle part of the series can be tedious to get through, in its attempt to give every major character a sufficient amount of background.

Nevertheless, the result of this build-up is an epic series with a rock-solid final quarter, even though it’s already more than thirty years old at this time. While this is definitely not a series you want to marathon in the beginning, it’s nevertheless a series that has a clear purpose and has found a good use for its forty-two episodes. So it’s nowhere near Tomino or World Masterpiece Theatre levels, but nevertheless it’s among the better series to have aired in the seventies.

Well, time for a quick review about another very obscure OVA from a few years ago. It’s basically about fifteen minutes ling, and what you’d call a minimalist anime: there’s no real animation, but instead the story is told by showing a number of drawings in quick succession, combined with sound effects, a bit of music here and there and two voice-actors. The result is a nice way to spend 15 minutes.

What’s especially nice is that the short starts with one big question-mark, and as it goes on it gradually starts explaining itself, until everything makes sense at the end. There’s a continuous haunting atmosphere, and especially the few fights simply delve into the surreal. The characters aren’t anything special, but so what? Who cares, it’s only fifteen minutes.

I like these kinds of short movies that only take up such a relatively short time. They’re able to experiment a lot with different animation techniques and concepts, which would be too risky for full fledged movies or even TV-series. Things as Genius Party, Robot Carnival or individual shots as Atama Yama, She and her Cat and Comedy. They lack the time to fully flesh out their storyline and characters, but nevertheless, they’re all interesting to watch. G-9 seems to be part of the GA-Nime franchise, and I hope to see the rest of it subbed some day.

A modern Japanese cruiser that somehow through some strange cosmic reason travels back in time to 1942. Of course, for these sorts of premises it’s easy to simply fall into a “let’s use this chance to show those American pigs how superior we are”-formula, though it’s one that Zipang does pretty well at avoiding these clichés. Instead, it becomes an intense and thought-provoking war-drama.

The interesting thing is that despite this being a series about the Second World War, there’s hardly anyone that’s really portrayed as a bad guy, apart from a number of high Japanese officials who hardly ever get any screen-time. This series isn’t looking to provide excuses for what happened back then, but instead focuses on completely different issues: if you had the power to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, yet this involved a radical change of history in who knows what kind of direction, would you do it? And what do we people who have lived in these times of peace, know about what being in a real war is like?

It’s a surprisingly intense series, and what makes it so interesting is that every single character has a different view on the events that happen through the series. Everyone has different ideals and priorities, which quite often clash with each other. Characters like Kusaka, Yonai and Kikuchi and their ideals are a delight to watch.

As for downsides, this series showed me why Studio Deen’s series hardly ever feature any major use of CG: they’re just not good at it. They were unable to evade it with this series, and the CG-warships look pretty fake. It’s a shame, because the characters look excellent and down to earth, not to mention the terrific soundtrack. Then there’s also that final episode: it’s rushed, doesn’t really solve anything, and simply stops at a point where the manga went further. Sure, I can understand that the series was planned for 26 episodes, and that the manga’s storyline simply doesn’t fit in such a length, but at least some kind of closure would have been preferred.

Overall, Zipang is for those who are looking for series about realistic warfare, which lacks humanoid mecha and instead focuses on traditional military weaponry. In fact, most of the action here is psychological warfare, rather than fast-paced and flashy dogfights. Thumbs up to Kazuhiro Furuhashi, the director of Chevalier, Amatsuki and Rurouni Kenshin Tsuiokuhen.

I remember how I one had a very strange bias against sports anime. I’m still not sure exactly why it was, but after watching shows as One Outs and Princess Nine, this bias is completely gone. Princess Nine makes baseball look fun.

You shouldn’t go into this series as a baseball-fan, however. At heart, this is a typical shoujo series about a bunch of characters who simply happen to play baseball. If you want baseball action, you should go and watch One Outs. Princess Nine is really about its characters. To give you an indication: episodes 1 to 20 only feature two official baseball matches. The rest of the time is really used to flesh out the cast, and give them depth. It’s a formula that works surprisingly well, although it’s not the most perfect execution.

Nevertheless, the creators succeeded in bringing an entire baseball team alive, including coach and manager. What especially shines is the series’ team spirit, as a baseball team that’s made up of girls tries to break through in a male dominated sport. It’s very well explained: while overblown a bit, but if you take talent from the entire country and gather it in one team, then you’ve got a pretty strong team that’s able to compete with males in a professional level.

The problem with this series come from its shoujo roots. The creators just love to let things play out like a soap opera, by throwing in lots of dramatic plot twists whenever they can. Think of random punks that arrive, just before a male and female character are about to meet each other, and especially the love triangle between the main characters gets a bit too melodramatic as the series goes on.

The series’ finale is without a doubt the weakest point of this series: not only does the love triangle really get in the way of everything that makes the series good, but the creators also tried to stuff an entire tournament in only four episodes. There’s no way to make these short matches have any impact, and so every unnamed player becomes a total noob, rather than the formidable opponents that they were portrayed as in the earlier parts of the series. I also think that the creators made the powers of their female lead a bit too powerful, up to the point that she only throws weak balls when she’s feeling lovesick, rather than standing against powerful opponents.

Nevertheless, I really liked this series, if only because of the downright awesome soundtrack. The creators managed to get the Warshaw Philharmonic Orchestra to perform for this series, and it shows: the soundtrack is rich, varied and epic. The series is most definitely overblown, but the characters nevertheless remain lovable, and of the kind that you can’t help but root for, despite that the matches themselves are perhaps a bit predictable.

Junjo Romantica: it may have been a yaoi-series, but it was an actually good one, focusing more than simply hawt bishie-on-bishie action, it explored what it meant to be in a relationship with another person. I hoped that the second season would be much of the same, continuing where the first season left off, but unfortunately I was disappointed. Junjo Romantica 2 is definitely a step back from Junjo Romantica 1.

This mostly can be blamed to balance issues. For those who have yet to see the first season: the series focuses on three different stories about three different and unrelated couples: Romantica, Egoist and Terrorist. The latter two already were in a minority in the first season, but they become virtually non-existent in the second: Egoist only has two episodes, while Terrorist only has one single episode. That’s way too short to get some get some good development out of them.

What makes things even worse is that the creators lacked the inspiration to fill up the Romantica storyline. If the creators had a good storyline to fill up the nine remaining episodes, then okay, I could live with the extremely unbalanced episode count, but the story becomes downright dull and ridiculous. The creators introduce the most ludicrous love triangles you can imagine, that get absolutely nowhere. The creators would have done much better to use this time on the much more interesting Terrorist and Egoist storylines, which suffer from a lack of conclusion because of their staggeringly low episode count.

The only good part in terms of drama in the Romantica-storyline is that we do get to know the main characters better, and especially Usagi’s family problems become a bit clearer and fleshed out in the second season. If the creators simply focused on that, and removed all the love triangles, it would have made for a pretty interesting story.

My big problem with these Shounen Ai series is that nearly all of them play in a world where every single character is gay. It seems to be a taboo of including any straight romance in these sorts of series, and that’s really a wasted opportunity. I wished that Junjo Romantica would turn out more like Antique Bakery, which just has one gay guy and enough people who are simply straight. Junjo Romantica 2 has now turned simply into a series that you can laugh at: it’s consistently capable of raising chuckles and laughs, whether intended or not doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, the first season was more than just that, and that’s what I’m missing here.

With a title as “Crazy Shrine Maidens”, the first thing you’d expect is a highly energetic silly slapstick comedy involving shrine maidens, but Kannagi is a bit different from that, and it’s actually more slice of life than slapstick. This series basically tells about a group of high school kids, one of which is some sort of tree spirit or god turned into a human. I kept watching it because I hoped that there would be some potential in its second half, but in the end I can’t really say that I’m glad to have watched it, or that it’s been a great series, but there have been a few interesting episodes.

What mostly turned me off about this series wasn’t the speed at which it developed into a harem, but rather that the show has an identity crisis. It felt to me that the creators never really knew what they wanted to do with this series. They’d go: “let’s have a simple slice of life series with a quirky man couple”, to “now let’s insert a complex back-story”, and soon enough “I want a harem”, “it’s been too serious, more comedy”, “Yaoi! We need Yaoi!”, “How about karaoke?” to eventually “crap, we still have an unsolved storyline! We need more drama!”.

Through the series, the series jumps from one theme to the other like an indecisive grasshopper. It makes the series varied, but also inconsistent, and the different segments don’t really feel complete and don’t flow well into each other. The whole back-story of the series gets completely ignored after only a few episodes, and in the end the drama that makes up the finale of the series may feel well developed as a standalone story, but within the series it feels forced and out of place.

There are however a number of standalone episodes that are quite a bit of fun to watch. It often involves episodes that are completely dedicated to one single subject, like the lead characters going to a karaoke-place, or like in the first episode of Lucky Star, where the characters kept talking about food. Because these episodes are so centred around one topic, they’re really able to get the best out of them, rather than feeling like an uninspired attempt to fill up an episode.

Another reason to check out this series: the godly animation of the first two episodes. In those, the creators really tried to animate EVERYTHING, and the result looks really gorgeous. Unfortunately, this disappears and doesn’t return for the rest of the series at all, so those who are watching this series for the eye candy might as well drop it after episode 2.

But in the end, the series wasn’t enjoyable enough to make me really recommend it to others. There’s so much better stuff out there, and Kannagi simply feels like a decent series. Above average, but not much more. It’s good for those moments where you have half an hour to burn, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to watch it. The creators simply wanted to do too much in only 13 episodes.

Visual novel harem adaptations have really become a notorious genre in anime. A lot of them are simple uninspired high school romances, but like with all other genres, there’s always a series that tries to go into a completely different route. An example of this: Chaos;Head, or as it’s official title seems to be ChäoS;HEAd. In twelve episodes, it presents a tale of delusions, paranoia and mind games.

While most of these series try to appeal to the otaku by letting lots of girls fall for the same guy for often inexplicable reasons, Chaos;Head goes even a step further, by featuring an otaku and hikkikomori as a lead character. For once, the lead character isn’t your “typical loser”, but rather one of the biggest losers that you can think of. He has no social skills whatsoever, has fallen in love with a fictional character and imagines her as a real person, and he’s generally hopeless in everything he does except for playing video games. This anime attempts to show what’s going on inside his mind, and how the guy reacts to all the weird things that happen throughout the series.

That’s nice and all, but what indeed makes this series enjoyable is the huge amounts of question marks that fly past the screen. There’s a huge backstory behind everything, and especially in the beginning episodes hardly anything makes sense, and it’s a lot of fun to watch everything unfold and see the pieces of the puzzle come together.

The problem with this series lies with its characters. This series is a harem series after all, and as the series goes on, more and more females strangely gather around the male lead. Thankfully most of them have very valid reasons to do so and don’t feel out of place, with one exception: Rimi. As the show goes on, she transforms from mysterious do downright annoying, and her romance is really underdeveloped. Combine that with an underdeveloped ultimate villain, and indeed, the ending becomes way too cheesy for its own good. It basically ignores most of the building up of the rest of the series and goes with a very predictable and unrewarding conclusion that just doesn’t match the series.

So no, when it comes to confusing series about visions and the altering of reality, then this series isn’t the best. Serial Experiments Lain for example is still better than this series, but it’s a very fine attempt nonetheless.