Announcement Time – Writers Recruitment #2

by SuperWooper, posted in About, Special Articles

Applications are closed. To everyone who submitted, thank you for your interest!

In June of 2017, I applied to be part of the team here at Star Crossed. Now, nearly two years later, I’m writing our new recruitment post. Time flies when you’re blogging anime.

With Aidan’s recent departure, it’s time for us to shore up our roster a bit. More writers means we’ll be able to cover more series, include more perspectives in our First Impressions posts, and perhaps introduce new features like Lenlo’s Throwback Thursday. Seasonal anime will always be our bread and butter, so we’ll be asking new recruits to give us a hand starting with the Summer 2019 season. If you watch anime week-to-week and want an established platform to write about it, then we’d love for you to apply.

Text blogging isn’t a glamorous job in this era of video sharing sites and social networks. If your application is accepted, your only rewards as a writer will be a sense of accomplishment and the rare message from an appreciative commenter. Keep at it long enough and you may even get one or two not-so-appreciative messages! Mario, Lenlo and I will be grateful to have you, though. We’ve all got different tastes, so you’re sure to find somebody you click with. We’re also flexible regarding upload schedules and show selection, though we’ll begin to expect a bit more once you’ve settled in.

Still keen on applying? Hit the jump for details!

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Serial Experiments Lain – 4 [Religion] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Serial Experiments Lain, Throwback Thursday

Hello all and welcome to another week of Throwback Thursday, posted on a Friday, for Serial Experiments Lain! This week Lain answers a lot of questions, introduces a lot more and dives into the surreal. So lets jump in!

Starting off, like I said Lain answers a lot of questions this week. Addressing the drugs, Wired, Lain’s prevalence in the world and how they all fit together. All without explicitly tying them together with direct callouts. Meanwhile it also introduced many more questions in regards to the Knights, and the line between the Wired and reality. Yet with all of this ground covered, it all felt like natural consequences of the story. Saving spoilers for after the break, I was very impressed with how so little managed to connect so much. Giving so much relevance to an episode title or the smallest grin from a character. I said last week I have to be in the right mind to watch Lain. This episode reinforces that belief for me. Enough dancing around the spoilers though, let’s talk about suicide, woo!

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One Punch Man S2 – 7 [Class S Heroes]

by Lenlo, posted in One Punch Man S2

Congratulations OPM, you found a new way to disappoint me. This time, OPM actually straight up cut content from the manga to try and fit it all conveniently into a single episode. All the while, gloriously screwing it up. Lets jump in, I promise this will be fast.

Starting off I would like to say, thank you Kenichiro Aoki for making this watchable. This man is responsible for every reasonable looking cut in the season. From Tank Top Master vs Garou to part of this week’s Seiryu vs Saitama. I don’t know how much work they have given him, nor is it the best I have ever seen. But by god is it the best animated parts of OPM S2. Everything else is just littered with issues. From ridiculous, almost sped up seeming pacing to weightless combat and flash fades, god the flash fades. I don’t know how much more I can say about OPM S2’s production before I start repeating myself. Assuming I am not already repeating myself, which I suspect I am. Suffice to say, if I do repeat myself I apologize. These posts have mostly become venting about the death of a series for me.

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Dororo – 19 [The Story of the Amanojaku]

by Lenlo, posted in Dororo

Hello all and welcome to a week of essentially filler for Dororo! We repeat plot points, Hyakki gets engaged and Dororo gets some funny faces. Let’s dive in!

Starting off, I normally do production here, but with the contents of this episode that seems ridiculous. Instead, I wanna ask why this episode exists, because this week is effectively filler. And not even good filler. Just filler that retreads what was already covered last week. I understand it was all a metaphor, that Hyakki’s reforged swords were all an allegory for Hyakki himself. Him and Dororo were realizing their true feelings, because they can only speak lies. Blah blah, whatever. My question is, did we need any of this? Did Dororo not establish the familial relationship between our two leads last episode? Was that not the whole head-rubbing thing and such? It just all feels pointless to me, like Dororo is treading water, when there is an actual plot sitting right in front of it. It’s disappointing.

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Kimetsu no Yaiba – 7 [Muzan Kibutsuji]

by Lenlo, posted in Kimetsu no Yaiba

Hello all, and welcome to a big week for Kimetsu no Yaiba. This is the week where I move it up from a “Competent” Shounen to a “Good/Great” Shounen. You see, Yaiba finishes up another arc, Nezuko kicks some butt and Tanjiro meets the big bad 8 episodes in. So let’s jump into it!

Starting off, production. Yaiba was as consistent as it always is on this front, beautiful with the occasional odd CGI walk. However it also had one of my favorite cuts this week. That being the flashback to the mountain, with Tanjiro running through the forest. I thought the camera movements/tracking and CGI was fantastic. Yeah, it wasn’t perfect but boy did I love that scene. On top of that, once again I want to bring up Yuki Kaijura. She really nailed the unease and tension of the 2nd half of the episode. Really elevating the emotions of a scene. There are some small gripes, for instance I think Yaiba wasted some potential in the underwater scene. And it was also overly dingy and dark. But it does its job, and with how good everything else is around it, that’s good enough. The story however, does far more than that.

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Mix – 07 [Worried?]

by SuperWooper, posted in Finished Series: Sports, Mix

What’s with all the A-list seiyuu in Mix? The four main characters are voiced by some of the biggest names in the industry right now: Yuki Kaji, the Uchida siblings, and Kana Hanazawa as new character Haruka. I tend to dodge a lot of the shounen and harem series that feature Mr. Kaji, and the Uchidas haven’t made a big mark on my anime consciousness yet, but there’s no denying their popularity. HanaKana is a favorite of mine, though, and I’m a bit worried about how Mix is set to utilize her. Haruka is the show’s girl next door, and she seems totally aloof regarding the boys’ fixation on her. They all rush to chat her up on the first day of high school, and even after they’re beaten back by her childhood friend Nangou, she maintains a puzzled facial expression. The camera even creates opportunities for the Tachibana brothers to do some ogling, from a relatively tame upskirt shot to a fresh-out-of-the-bath pose when Touma walks in on her. The pleasant ring of Hanazawa-san’s voice is wasted on assurances that he “barely missed the show,” or not to worry because she’d already put on her panties.

Maybe none of this is really important, and I’m just reaching for things to talk about regarding this episode. It’s certainly light on baseball and heavy on juvenile romance, with Haruka’s appearance cementing a love square between herself and the mixed Tachibana kids. The title of this episode comes from a conversation between Otomi and Haruka, when the older girl asks whether Otomi is worried that she might steal one of the boys away. It’s a subtle but effective way of cutting right to the heart of the younger girl’s crush on her stepbrother, but it comes a bit too soon in their relationship. Sure, the kids’ parents are longtime friends, but Haruka has only just met the Tachibanas. Adachi’s characters are usually too mature for their age, but for a girl to banter with a new acquaintance about her incestuous feelings just a day after meeting her is preposterous. Did we skip a bunch of chapters from the manga here? It doesn’t help that their whole visit feels strange, from the convenient bath breakdown to the peppy guitar and recorder-led tune that overstays its welcome.

It’s not enough that the high school hormones are flowing in tropey fashion, either, as Otomi has to pull double duty as a romantic interest in a middle school story that felt superfluous. The next episode preview indicates that the new middle school girl has a baseball-playing brother, so maybe Mix will leverage this new love triangle in order to get back to the diamond soon. It’s funny, though – my favorite parts of Cross Game were always those spent away from the baseball field, and now I can’t wait for Mix to head back there. Everything to do with the new middle school characters felt like a distraction, though I can see where we’re headed. Some of the younger kids need to age up before the definitive Meisei comeback year, so the story is biding its time until then. I just wish that sense of playing the waiting game wasn’t so evident in the show’s pacing and choice of subject matter.

Serial Experiments Lain – 3 [Psyche] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Serial Experiments Lain, Throwback Thursday

Starting off, let me apologize for the lateness of this weeks Lain post. I tend to try and digest an episode before writing, and Lain makes that… difficult. As this week we get into the human psyche, the line between reality and the Wired blurs and Lain becomes multiple people. Lets hop right in!

Starting off, this week was weird. Like, really weird, but also very interesting. I loved the use of consistent imagery, connecting different events of the show. For instance the red dots in the car window, mimicking the red dot of the gun last episode. Building upon Lain’s trauma with it. The empty house which Lain comes home to, apparently each night, and how Lain mills about like this isn’t anything new. Really nailing home how alone and disconnected from everyone she is. Idling away her hours on the computer. I actually stopped Lain for a second and looked around my apartment, realizing I had been doing the exact same thing. Its a really weird feeling to get from a show made in ’98. Even the name of the chip Lain gets this week is filled with connotations. So much so I probably missed most of them. It’s ridiculously layered.

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One Punch Man S2 – 6 [The Uprising of the Monsters]

by Lenlo, posted in One Punch Man S2

Sigh Welcome once again to the sinking ship that is OPM S2. This week we see a fantastic character done dirty, botched pacing, and more boob shots than you can swing a stick at. Lets dive in.

As always, production, and oof. OOF. JC Staff screwed the pooch this week. I won’t even talk animation, because that’s obvious. Instead lets talk about how JC Staff screwed up direction and shot composition, when Murata had already laid it out for them. Throughout this episode, we have 2 conflicts going on. Genos vs the Monsters, and the Tournament. OPM cuts between the two, progressing both at once. However, what happens in the manga is the tournament comes first in ever sequence. Showing a martial arts technique and its effects, then cutting straight to Genos performing an S-Class Super Hero version of the same thing. High Voltage Fist, Machine Gun Blow, Rocket Stomp, all these mimic techniques of the martial artists. Yet JC Staff couldn’t even do that right. Showing them out of order, with no impact or connection between them. This is a staggering level of incompetence.

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Dororo – 18 [The Story of the Cape of No Mercy]

by Lenlo, posted in Dororo

Welcome one and all to Dororo’s redemption, the episode that takes us back to first cour quality. We have demons, sword fights, and poignant character moments. Maybe, just maybe, I won’t be disappointed in 2 months. Lets jump in!

First up, thank you MAPPA, for getting production right this week. Every aspect was, at the least, decent. There are still small nitpicks that could be made, but they are just that. Nitpicks. The actual big picture is that this episode felt like one from the first cour. Sure, the demon shark fight was rather fast, but that wasn’t the focus of the episode. That was Hyakki vs Tahomaru and co, and I enjoyed this. It was animated much better than previous episodes, really moving the “camera” around and giving us full body shots. Yes some detail goes away at points, but in its place we get a much more movement. To top it all off, the music was great and there were lots of picturesque shots that adored. It’s entirely possible my standards have fallen, but I am just glad Dororo is actually animated this week.

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Kimetsu no Yaiba – 6 [Swordsman Accompanying a Demon]

by Lenlo, posted in Kimetsu no Yaiba

Welcome everyone to another episode of Yaiba! We are 1/4th of the way through now and Yaiba is 3 arcs in, with no plans of slowing. We arrive at the town, a hunt ensues and combat begins with our first super powered Demon. Lets jump in!

As always, production first. I could go on and on about how pretty Yaiba is. How much I love the water effects and uneven line work, etc etc. I have done that every week though, so this time let’s talk sound design, cause whoo. It’s good. Not only is it a Yuki Kaijura OST, always a plus, but Yaiba is just nailing the folly work. Seriously, whoever did the sound of the gnashing teeth deserves a raise. That was a suitably creepy and hair-raising, a unique sound I have no heard before in anime. As a whole it all comes together for a simply fantastic sounding episode. My only real complaint with it is the CGI crowds/walking. Yaiba is finally starting to show some cracks in the CGI, with the wide shots. Luckily all of the closeups are still 2D. That aside though, onto the story. Continue reading “Kimetsu no Yaiba – 6 [Swordsman Accompanying a Demon]” →