Wooper: Rare is the anime season that gets me interested in upwards of ten shows, but Fall 2022 seems to have managed it, even while packing itself full of shounen series. These aren’t your average battle manga adaptations, though – we’ve got the return of a former “Big 3” WSJ property, the third season of a fabulously-animated Bones show, and the TV premiere of what’s probably the hottest manga in the world at present. These shows are so big that I don’t even need to list their names (though you can find our thoughts on them down below), but there’s plenty more anime to enjoy starting this October, including continuations of megahits like Spy x Family, blog favorites like Golden Kamuy, and oddballs like Pop Team Epic. Fans of pop cultural institutions like Gundam and Urusei Yatsura can look forward to new series as well, for the first time in 6 and 40 years, respectively. I’m just scratching the surface here, but I can’t list every noteworthy new show in the intro when we’ve got the whole season preview to go! Let us know which of this fall’s many offerings you’re most excited for by voting in the poll below, and read on to see how we’re feeling about the last quarter of 2022.
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Middling Expectations
Urusei Yatsura (2022)
Studio: David Production
Director: Takahiro Kamei, Yasuhiro Kimura, Hideya Takahashi
Series composition: Yuuko Kakihara
Source: Manga
The Premise: A flirtatious high schooler tries to score with every woman he sees, except for the alien princess who lives with him.
Wooper: Urusei Yatsura is a massive deal in Japan, being the first and most enduring series by legendary mangaka Rumiko Takahashi, with an anime adaptation by national treasure Mamoru Oshii. It’s also the progenitor of a zillion romcom tropes, not least of which is the Magical Girlfriend, embodied here by the tiger bikini-clad Lum. Though most western anime viewers will probably recognize her iconic design, this 46 episode reboot will be their proper introduction to Lum and the rest of series’ expansive cast. Should we count ourselves fortunate that Urusei Yatsura is being remade at all, let alone by this particular team? That remains to be seen, but personally, I’m not feeling terribly optimistic – this is the arm of David Pro that worked on 2.43 Seiin Volley-bu, one of our least favorite anime of last year, plus the pose-heavy JoJo Part 5, the rigidity of which is completely opposed to Urusei Yatsura’s ideal look and feel. The 1980s show is characterized by total freedom of movement, with male lead Ataru’s contortions and Lum’s flight patterns being unbound by the demands of a typical anime production. That sort of flexibility is critical to selling the series’ crazy developments: spaceships crash landing on Earth every third episode, hot babes of various mythological races appearing in Ataru’s neighborhood, alien technology interfering with the characters’ lives on a weekly basis. Some viewers will find these ideas dated no matter how they’re presented, but there are surely just as many who will accept them if they’re given a proper visual foundation. We’ll have to wait until October 13th for our first look at how sturdy that foundation will be.
My Hero Academia Season 6
Studio: Bones
Director: Masahiro Mukai with Kenji Nagasaki as Chief Director
Series composition: Yousuke Kuroda
Source: Manga
The Premise: Season 6 of My Hero Academia. You know the premise by now. Superheroes and villains meet for a climactic penultimate battle.
Lenlo: Let’s be honest here, you know what MHA is, so let’s cut straight to brass tacks. Content wise, this season is just one big battle arc. On the plus side, cool battles! On the down side, I no longer have confidence in bones and Kenji Nagasaki to give those battles the attention and production they deserve. Oh sure, we will get the occasional Nakamura cut or something, and those will be great. But outside of those I’m just going to find myself looking back at Horikoshi’s art and wishing it could have gotten better. Combine that with a general decline of the narrative content as he starts to lean more and more into basic shounen trappings, no idea why maybe weekly serialization is getting to him, and I just don’t have much energy to be excited for this season. I’ll watch it for sure. But I don’t yet know if I’ll enjoy it.
Continue reading “Fall 2022 Season Preview” →
