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Well, it’s not fun to be harsh against a series that I originally fell in love with, but I have to be honest: The Paris Chapters of Nodame Cantabile are not as good as the original Nodame Cantabile series. It’s still a fun and engaging series, but in the end it didn’t live up to the expectations that were created by the stellar first season.

The cause of this is definitely not due to the main characters: Nodame and Chiaki are still wonderful characters, and the best jokes about them are still downright hilarious, in the same fashion as the first season. In the Paris Chapter, we can explore both of them as they try to break through in the professional classical music business. It’s a tale about young adults, just like you’d expect from Noitamina and it works wonderful.

But in the end, it feels like something is missing. To start with, the side-characters just aren’t as interesting as the side-cast of the first season. It may be because the second season was only handed half of the airtime when compared to the first one, but even then they feel really bland and one-sided when compared to the colourful side-characters of the first season. These people managed to make an impact from the first moment they appeared on screen, which is what I missed here a bit.

And then there’s also the matter that the second season just covers a bit more boring part of the life of the main characters. It’s all pretty straightforward here: you know these guys are going to break through, when compared to the first season where they had much more and bigger problems to deal with.

The animation quality also seems to have decreased: the motion-capture is even more apparent, and the regular animation feels that it was blessed with a smaller budget. Still, don’t get me wrong: this series still is very good. A rating of 82,5/100 for me is still a really enjoyable series, and it’s still really fun to watch. It just doesn’t live up to season one, which was just too good for this series. Sure, the Paris Chapters serve as a good build-up, but as a standalone series you do not want to expect the same quality as the first season.

Matsumoto Leiji once was the pioneer of space operas, even before Yoshiyuki Tomino came with Mobile Suit Gundam. His influence was huge, and so even in the 21st centuries, his adaptations are still getting themselves spin-offs every now and then. The Galaxy Railways obviously based itself around the concept of “trains in space”, and while I wouldn’t recommend this series to someone who’s looking for a good introduction to Matsumoto Leiji’s style, it nevertheless is a pretty decent action-series.

The basic set up is that there are trains who travel through space. There sometimes (read: nearly every episode) goes something horribly wrong with them, and it’s up to our main characters to save those in trouble, acting as a combination of the royal defence force and a rescue squad. While trains randomly crashed a bit too often for my liking, the individual episodes were helped by the fact that the creators tried to stuff in lots of different ideas into their stories, whether they made sense or not. The series also has a great selection of character-designs. Matsumoto Leiji’s designs have always stood out, and the creators of this series did a good job of giving them a modern and epic look.

Unfortunately, the series does have a number of large and quite annoying flaws: it has both of what I’d like to call a “bad main character syndrome” and a “bad ultimate villain syndrome”. Manabu just keeps whining on and on about ethics and morals, and especially spends the first half defending his cheesy ideals. As soon as he starts developing, he thankfully matures, but as a result he becomes a bit too perfect of a character: loved by all women, perfectly skilful, no flaws left whatsoever. His female love interest is completely the opposite: completely useless throughout the largest part of the series. The side characters are the ones who end up saving this series: Bulge, Bruce and especially David are great to watch.

And regarding the villains who pop up in the final climax of the series: they’re just a cheap rip-off of the Mazone from Captain Harlock. There’s a difference between a homage and a rip-off, and in this case the creators didn’t seem to realize what made the Mazone work so well: they had firm resolutions: they considered their alternatives and went with the one that involved ending tons of lives. The villains here are somewhat stuck between good guys and “yeah, we weren’t evil; we were forced to wipe out half of the universe; have pity with us”. To be honest, it feels rather fake.

And it’s really a shame, because the rest of this finale was good stuff. It would have been epic if the main character and villains weren’t so annoying. Overall, it’s definitely not the best series, but there definitely were some good episodes in these first 26 episodes. However, the best thing that you should do if you want to get a taste of Matsumoto Leiji’s signature style is simple: check out either Captain Harlock, Queen Millenia or Galaxy Express 999.

I originally planned to wait a bit longer with watching this series, but due to certain…*ahem* developments I just had to finish it before the end of the year. Anne of Green Gables, or Akage no Anne is part of the famous World Masterpiece Theatre. It’s written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and adapted by Isao Takahata, just before he joined Hayao Miyazaki (who also worked on certain parts of the series by the way) to create Studio Ghibli. While I can’t say it’s the best WMT out there (it lacks conflict for that; this series is largely just slice of life), but it did succeed in what it set out to do: creating the wonderful character called Anne, along with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert who raised her.

The series confirmed a suspicion I kept having about Isao Takahata, since I’ve been rather disappointed by the movies that he made for Studio Ghibli. The guy is most likely the director with the biggest sense of realism out of all anime directors out there, but his movies were all just too short to make any real impact on me, and this series showed that his specific style really is at its best when applied to such a long series, where you can see the characters slowly developing and changing, while going through their daily lives.

So yes, the biggest strength of this series is the huge sense of realism. Anne of Green Gables is a tale of growing up, and especially the first half of the series is chockfull of nostalgia. There are so many things that a viewer can relate to. Every single character in the series just feels like a real person, whose problems are those of real people instead of the problems of soap opera characters. This also means that it’s very easy to find the series boring, though. The conflicts in this series are far apart, even when compared to other WMT-series. You need to like slice of life if you want to be able to enjoy this series.

And of course, Anne makes the long length really worth it. The series shows her growing up from a cute, energetic and very talkative 11 year old to an inspiring mature 16 year old. She’s a wonderful character to watch, especially in her younger years. She does suffer from being a bit too perfect when she’s fifteen years old, though. She achieves any goals she sets to herself, everyone likes her and becomes enamoured with her, and she simply doesn’t have any flaws.

It’s interesting though that Lucy Maud Montgomery was fully aware of these flaws, and after watching this series, it becomes apparent that she tried to make Emily of the New Moon a completely different character with actually lots of flaws.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t prevent the conclusion of the series to be utterly amazing, and the series actually ends with a short but very powerful climax that’s definitely worth watching the 46 episodes that preceded it. Everything that the series has been subtly building up for comes together like a charm, and really ends the series on the best note possible.

As for Hayao Miyazaki’s influences: it’s very easy to spot the episodes on which he worked. The animation of the first fifteen episodes is of a considerable bigger quality than the rest of the series (remember, this series was made in 1978, and probably has the most solid graphics of any TV-series produced in the 1970s), and you can really spot his trademark style of animation, especially comparable to movies as Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbour Totoro.

Anne of Green Gables really is one of the very few WMT-series to be fully subbed and widely available on the internet at this point, and so I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want to get a taste of the lighter side of the franchise. While most other WMT-series are much darker than this one is, it nevertheless is a very charming and adorable slice of life series in Canada of about a century ago.

In terms of describing Cromartie High School, I think Jascii put this the best way: Cromartie High School is not about delinquents; “it’s about a bunch of morons who look like delinquents”. It’s Production IG’s shot at a comedy, and while it’s not one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, it’s a very capable comedy-series nonetheless.

The fun in this series comes from the fact that even though the characters are all a bunch of idiots, they still try to be smart by engaging in huge debates over nothing, and they keep doing so with a straight face (many thanks to the animation, which remains consistent throughout the entire series). Every time a fight is about to take place, you can bet your hat that the characters will just talk endlessly about how they’re going to fight, and in the end they lose interest because of something else completely random that caught their attention.

That, along with the originality of this series make it a pretty funny short series (the episodes are only 10 minutes). The creators really try to toss everything they can think of at the viewers. We’re talking here about meteors, aliens, robots, grown men in bunny-suits and a Freddy Mercury-lookalike. This is more than enough material to keep the viewer from getting bore, so this series also doesn’t suffer from a lacklustre second half…

…although the characters do remain rather one-dimensional. There are also a bunch of characters with really inconsistent personalities, especially the main one: he changes from a complete moron to someone with actual intelligence, depending on the writers’ mood. There is character-development, but it’s pretty much become useless because of the episodes that seem to be aired in random order (one particular character is moves to America for a number of episodes, and yet a few episodes during this period show him like nothing’s ever happened).

Nevertheless, Cromartie High School is a quirky little series that’s good for a nice laugh. It’s got enough material to fill its airtime with (although it does at times overuse its running jokes too much, mostly the Afro-guy gets a bit too much airtime then what’s good for him), but I laughed a lot during this series.

Those who’ve been following my reviews for the past few months probably noticed that a lot of them started with something like “I wasn’t looking forward to the premise at all … but my expectations were proven wrong”. This pattern obviously isn’t going to last for much longer, since I’m about to get to the shows that I’m actually looking forward to, but before that happens I want to direct your attention to Sugoiyo!! Masaru-san, or Sexy Commando Gaiden, which is probably the epitome of this effect.

The promo-art in this case does absolutely nothing to prepare you for what this series is really about. Just take a look: it looks like some sort of mediocre wrestling-series, doesn’t it? Instead, this is a fully-fledged comedy-series, about a guy who uses his sex-appeal in order to win his fights (among others). I think that really nothing can prepare someone for the extreme silliness that is this series.

Still, it’s one of the better comedies that I’ve watched so far. It’s ten years old at this point, but it can easily drink many modern comedies under the table. Its big strength is its consistency. This may sound a bit weird coming from a series that uses a lot of randomness as the base for its jokes, but what I mean by that is that even though this series won’t necessarily make you laugh harder than other comedies, it will make you laugh longer. The episodes are only eight minutes long, but for every single one of them, you just know that it’s going to crack you up. There are no weak episodes, there are no disappointing moments, and every single of its 48 episodes delivers. Now that’s what I call a good comedy.

Through its entire length, this series knows exactly what it is: a comedy. Never does it try to gain sympathy by switching to pointless drama – the number one mistake that comedies can make. Even the ending has to be one of the best endings I’ve seen in a comedy, simply because even there the laughs continue to keep coming. Ending parodies are actually full of potential, but you unfortunately hardly ever get to see them since most comedies try to be bigger than they actually are and want to have a “satisfying ending” themselves.

Also part of this series’ success is of course the cast of characters, who managed to keep fresh through the entire run of the series both the main and the side-characters). Obviously, you shouldn’t expect rocket-science from these guys, but they’ve got enough sides to keep them from getting boring after a few episodes, and their quirks are fresh and original (which surprises me in a way: ten years, and still nobody has tried to rip them off?).

This series’ only downside is that at times, its tricks to fill up extra airtime get a bit too ridiculous. You can exactly see when the creators have run out of inspiration to exactly fill their eight minutes for that episode, because the episode randomly lapses into a cheesy insert-song that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual episode. Thankfully, none of these insert-songs feel repetitive, and the creators have enough ideas to prevent even these insert-songs from getting boring, but it does remain a little cheap. There’s also a 30-second recap of the previous episode at the beginning, and even though these recaps make no bloody sense at all, it does become a bit too much after every single episode, considering how each of them is only eight minutes long.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for something to laugh at and don’t need any moe-schoolgirls for that, then I wholeheartedly recommend Sexy Commando Gaiden. Very few comedies can boast the same amount of consistent laughs as this one, and some of the jokes are absolutely brilliant. I wouldn’t be surprised if the creators of Gintama also got some inspiration from this little series.