The brutal and beautiful fight scenes

One thing that’s clear from episode 1 onwards is that Akudama Drive has an unusually confident visual panache, where as much love has been laboured in crafting such deep cinematic environments as compared to the much more familiar (but no less satisfying) craft of animating people punching each other.

Just like in Cowboy Bebop‘s classic Pierrot Le Fou episode, Brawler and Executioner go all out at an abandoned theme park in the middle of night, chasing each other over the twisting rails of roller coasters and old bridges.

There’s so many little touches here to confirm Akudama Drive‘s quality, like how there’s a thunder storm going on at the same time: as the rain drops, it’s like each tiny droplet has a life of its own, adding only more weight to each painful hit, whilst at another point, a bolt of lightning strikes and powers up a ghostly ferris wheel in the background.

It smacks of effort, the kind that TV anime can’t usually manage, and it’s a rare thing indeed. It’s this ability to craft scenes full of personality that really elevates Akudama Drive for me.

Atmospheric is an overused word, but yeah, I lost myself in the detail.

Unhinged: Cutthroat and Akudama Drive‘s weird empathy for psychopaths

Cutthroat isn’t exactly a typical protagonist, is he? None of the Akudama are, but Cutthroat’s probably the most egregious: an insane serial killer with a clearly unhealthy fascination with Swindler that eventually explodes into mountains of dead bodies and a swirling, intoxicating lust for blood… So yeah, not exactly typical!

In any other story, Cutthroat would be presented as evil by default and so far beyond redemption, yet for more than half of Akudama Drive, he’s fighting on the side that we assume represents justice… but let’s be clear, he’s downright unhinged!

I can’t recall another anime that been so willing to build its story around such a morally dubious set of characters, but it adds a fascinating and refreshing side to what could be an otherwise very rote authority-is-bad narrative: neither side is clean and both do despicable things, but that only makes for a more compelling watch. It forces individuals on both sides to consider their positions and decide for themselves what’s right from wrong, rather than being told. That’s the way it should be I think, as it reflects a more realistic position on modern life and the kind of dilemma we all have to wrestle with. Each of us can do bad and good things. Which is to say, Cutthroat chose to kill all of those people, and if nothing else, I respect his dedication to the cause (and for making Akudama Drive that much more interesting!)

Smiling at the end: Swindler’s death

Akudama Drive isn’t afraid of killing off its characters, is it? All of the Akudama go out in rather spectacular ways, but it’s especially poignant when Swindler and Courier finally take their turns. I’ve seen it said that all of the Akudama die with smiles on their faces, but Swindler’s death is the most bedevilling, given that she’s really the heart of this story and her callous execution is a seismic moment that profoundly signals that this is a world on the brink of total ruin.

She is the touch paper that ignites a revolution, and in doing so, truly becomes the Akudama Swindler (and finally gets her own cool intro-sequence too!) but behind her smile is the self-confidence of a person that’s finally found a purpose in her life and seems content even with a lightsaber(!) stabbed through her heart: it’s the face of a person that’s won. You can’t ignore the Christ-like symbolism of her being pinned to a cross-shaped slab of blood-splattered concrete either, and it doesn’t half look cool; just like everything else in Akudama Drive, everything, even death, is a beautifully rendered moving image.

Good and bad are a matter of perception? Explaining the Akudama Drive ending

Akudama Drive isn’t interested in binaries: neither side, not Executioners nor Akudama, come out of this with a moral victory. Straight from the off, it’s at pains to point out that the Akudama are not good people, but it’s also made abundantly clear that they live in a heavily oppressed society, where the government have not a jot of care for the notion of collateral damage or due process; if you are so judged as a criminal, you die! By the Akudama Drive ending, it’s quite clear that the Executioners are themselves like wolves in a sheep’s clothing, Akudama in all but name: their eyes, especially when it comes to Swindler’s execution, flash like predators in the night, hunting their prey.

Now, of course, on the other side is the psychopathic Cutthroat and Doctor, so this is what I’m saying about binaries, ultimately there are individuals on both sides that have good intentions but it’s left to them to realise that they are living in a messed up world. Swindler and Courier come to this realisation, and right at the end, in the act of restraining a helpless little girl hellbent on avenging her dead parents, Pupil seems to realise this as well. Even the Police Chief turns a gun on himself because he knew all along that the Executioners were out of control, but was too cowardly to do anything about it:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

The way the Akudama Drive ending renders these chaotic, climatic scenes is amazing, by the way – it really feels like we’re watching the end of the world unfold, a deeply unsettling apocalyptic feeling with visions of a city being sacked.

And it doesn’t let up as Courier rides out into the city’s outskirts, the silent desolation of his landscape; that leave-less tree, the broken moon shining in the twilight and being hounded by those clearly pilotless flying machines, the sense of hopelessness seeps right in. I was rooting for Brother and Sister to make it to the mountains too, but it was a bitter-sweet feeling, because so much had been sacrificed to carry them there.

Is Moriarty the Patriot good?

Moriarty the Patriot feels like it has the potential to be a greatly thought provoking anime, and this first episode certainly wasn’t a bad start. Moriarty is a character with a gray morality: he catches and executes-by-proxy a rich predator with an eye for young boys. It’s suitably edgy and doesn’t really frame Moriarty as anything other than a champion of the people, a cosmic avenger, but sooner or later, the show has to question his sense of justice if it’s going to go anywhere. Just like in Death Note, Light begins by preying on criminals, only to become consumed by his power, Moriarty’s fall could be just as spectacular. I particularly like his character design: a blonde, attractive young man, with blood-red eyes. This is definitely one to keep an eye on: a story that could build itself into something really special.

Anime like Moriarty the Patriot

Moriarty the Patriot director Kazuya Nomura’s previous project was Run with the Wind and if this ends up being anywhere near as good as that, then I can’t grumble. Run with the Wind, an anime about running and so much more, is the kind of story that keeps me watching anime after all these years.

Now, I must admit, I’ve never been one for the Sherlock Holmes-type stories, but even I know there’s been any number of gender-flipped and anthropomorphic Sherlock anime over the years (that I simply haven’t seen). I remember being impressed by the gothic atmosphere of Black Butler, another pretty-boy anime set in Victorian England, whilst the way that Moriarty is happy to play judge, jury and executioner suggests that we’re in for journey down a rather dark and vengeful path, perhaps a bit like Monster (and well, Moriarty looks a bit like Johan, doesn’t he? Even more so in promotional art where he’s holding a gun to his head in a strangely suicidal pose.)

How many episodes does Moriarty the Patriot have?

Moriarty the Patriot will have 24 episodes in total, but they will be split across 2 seasons. This first season will have 12 episodes, and the second season, which is set to begin in April 2021, will also have 12 episodes.

Is The Gymnastics Samurai good?

The Gymnastics Samurai is tonally all over the place. Is it a slapstick comedy? Is it a serious sports drama? A lot of the staff working on it came from the meme friendly Zombie Land Saga, which melded horror comedy with sickly-sweet idol anime to annoyingly diminishing results (I’d recommend just watching Sankarea instead!). The Gymnastics Samurai doesn’t have Zombie Land Saga‘s novelty value: the aesthetic feels rote and the slapstick humour (that bird!!) clashes awfully with the main character’s serious internal drama. Most of all, it isn’t rousing or exciting, and an anime about gymnastics should be spell-binding, right? It’s a seriously impressive sport that requires real bravery and strength, after all, but Haikyu!! makes even volleyball seem more impressive than this. So yeah, it’s a shame: sports aside, I wanted The Gymnastics Samurai to be good and picked it out because having an adult main character is always nice, but oh well!

Anime like The Gymnastics Samurai

I suppose there’s a few ways to look at this:

• The Gymnastics Samurai as a family drama: in which case, Barakamon better nails this delicate walk between slapstick humour and pathos. In it, a jaded artist is shipped off to the coast to rehabilitate his passion for the elegant world of calligraphy and there meets a young girl whose innocence slowly erodes his stuffy, adult defensiveness.
• The Gymnastics Samurai as a sports anime: in which case, it’s hard to look past Yuri on Ice. It’s about figure-skating rather than gymnastics, but both begin with the main character on the verge of retiring.
• Finally, there’s Zombie Land Saga, which is basically from the same creative staff that made The Gymnastics Samurai. If you ever wanted to see a zombie moe girl trying to rap, this is the anime for you.

How many episodes does The Gymnastics Samurai have?

Having checked a couple of different sources, as of writing, the total number of episodes for The Gymnastics Samurai is not yet known.

Is Akudama Drive good?

It’s certainly fun, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it good. Watching this first episode, “style over substance” is what I was thinking. Akudama Drive is about spectacle, first and foremost, with a ton of futuristic detail and movement in most every scene; and most every scene is an action scene. Which is to say, it’s a really breathless introduction to these characters, all of them villains: one is a man capable of ripping hundreds of robots to pieces with his bare hands, another a seductive doctor only too willing to kill or maim rather than help. All of them summoned to the same place: to save a criminal (known as Cutthroat!) that’s about to be executed by guillotine, no less! So, I suppose I’m actually quite immature, because I only really felt excited about Akudama Drive when the violence went up a notch towards the end and became so hyper stylized that literal heads were rolling off of people’s shoulders.

As is befitting an anime co-produced by a video game company, there’s a lot of CG here too, only it isn’t as obtrusive as a Polygon Pictures anime like Ajin, rather the CG quite expertly adds a sense of depth to the cityscape. Indeed, the environment is the best thing about this episode, really.

Described in 2018 as being “inspired by 1990s crime action films such as Pulp Fiction and Léon: The Professional“, in reality Akudama Drive feels a bit more like watching an edgy superhero comic book adaptation, and therefore, feels a bit played out too.

Anime like Akudama Drive

At first, the sheer visual overload of Akudama Drive reminded me of how it felt to watch Gankutsuou, which also (despite being a ridiculous 16 years old at this point, where does the time go?!) heavily uses CG to create a detailed, massive environment, albeit in a tonally completely different show.

Tiger & Bunny is another series that has a very Western comic book feel that I was reminded of when watching this, but perhaps the closest in narrative is the classic Cyber City Oedo 808, which has that nostalgic Nineties Madhouse aesthetic with Yoshiaki Kawajiri in his pomp. It is about a trio of unapologetic criminals tasked with fighting even bigger villains.

How many episodes does Akudama Drive have?

Produced at the famous Studio Pierrot, Akudama Drive is set to have 12 episodes. It is an anime original project co-produced by Too Kyo Games, a video game company formed by the creators of Danganronpa in 2017.

Obviously, it’s the beginning of a new anime season too, and since I’ve been relatively quiet over the summer months, I thought I’d drop a note to say, “Hi!” before there’s a flood – at least for this blog – of first episode reviews. This year is the first in a long while that I’ve written so many seasonal, gut reaction pieces, and so far, I’ve enjoyed the format, if just because it requires me to favor a sense of urgency over procrastination, and also feels like it breathes new embers into this, my perpetually smouldering corner of the internet, like a fireplace still warm after a long night.

There’s at least 5 new series airing over the next 9 days that I hope to write something about, so please look forward to those.

Anime blogging in 2020 in many ways feels quaint, but I think that’s merely an illusion cast by social media. Anime blogs are harder to find today, but they are still out there, with new sites being created all of the time. To this end, back in April, I created Anime Blog Tracker, where I’ve been quietly curating (and polling) a list of anime blogs and YouTube channels to index. It’s a really simple site right now, but I’d expect to augment it with new functionality (or just simply a new UI) at some point. Anyway, that’s a thing that I built, so do check it out if you like reading anime blogs.

Before I bid you adieu, one last thing. Have you seen ACCA: 13? I think it’s the perfect Autumn anime: a quiet, smokey political thriller, obsessed with food and other sensual, seasonal aesthetics (both images in this post are from it). A chill Rose of Versailles. I watch it in the mornings before work, framed by my dewy back garden and the steam rising from my hot tea. It’s lowkey one of my favourite anime of the last 5 years.

Plot summary

Yuuji, you’re a strong kid, so help others. Even if it’s only those closest to you, just save the people you can. It’s okay if you lose your way, and don’t worry about whether they will thank you or not. Just save as many people as you can, even if it’s only one. When you die, you should be surrounded by people. Don’t end up like me.

Yuuji’s grandad, on his deathbed

Despite being a once in generation sportsman, high schooler Yuuji seems more interested in hanging out with the quaint Occult Research Club, if only because it affords him time after school to look after his ailing grandad. That is, until, on the very same night that his grandad passes, he runs into the enigmatic Fushiguro and on his dark coattails, the violent world of the supernatural beckons. By the episode’s end, Yuuji is faced with a choice that will colour the rest of his life: to run and hide, or to face the horrors of the world head-on?

Is Jujutsu Kaisen any good?

Just over a year after Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Shonen Jump (by way of the anime studio MAPPA) brings us the atmospheric horror action anime Jujutsu Kaisen and, indeed, I loved it. Narratively similar to Mob Psycho 100, just not as awkward or introspective, where this first episode really shines is in how electrifying the action feels. It’s powerful, fast and lovingly animated. And I think I can pinpoint the moment that I fell head-over-heels for it too! It was when a sprinting Fushiguro summons up a pair of fighting demon dogs (giving me big Wolf’s Rain flashbacks) to attack a monster at the same time as furiously jumping into the melee himself. This scene neither slows nor draws attention to itself, whilst the pace simply keeps ramping up.

It’s a shame then (and feels weirdly out of place too) when Jujutsu Kaisen chooses to suddenly objectify the sole female character by having her unconsciously groped by a many-handed monster “curse” as if to remind us that, “Yup! You are watching anime after all!” but I suppose there had to be one drawback, eh?!

Let’s see what the second episode brings us!

Postcard memories of Jujutsu Kaisen

Notes on Deca-Dence

• Is Deca-Dence a giant robot anime? Not really, but then it does have a moving fortress that can elaborately transform into a giant punching fist. So, on second thought, I suppose you could say it’s half way there!
• It’s effective at depicting a sense of scale too: the kaiju “bosses” are massive lumbering beasts, as tall as skyscrapers, and as slow as they are destructive. The sheer spectacle of them alone is worth checking out.
• Deca-Dence is directed by one of anime’s brightest new talents, Yuzuru Tachikawa, he of Death Parade and Mob Psycho 100. I don’t really have a sense of Tachikawa’s style yet in the same way that I do of someone like Masaaki Yuasa. He’s maybe more competent than he is idiosyncratic? Yet one thing’s for sure: the guy directs good anime, and attracts good animators to his projects. This is no different: there’s a lot of love being lavished upon it.
• Deca-Dence could be described as a reverse isekai: it’s about a human “NPC” trying to escape a fake world, as opposed to being about a human “player” entering into it.
• If it’s missing anything, it’s that the music doesn’t quite live up to the humongous action. It’s missing a muscian as brash and as bold as Hiroyuki Sawano, but then I suppose the Attack on Titan comparisons really would be insufferable, eh?

Anime like Deca-Dence

• Attack on Titan (what did I just say about insufferable?!) because, at first glance, Deca-Dence is a story of humanity being driven to the brink of extinction by a mysterious threat and dropping like flies. It’s not as animalistic as Attack on Titan though. While Eren is an avenger, driven by hatred, Natsume is a smiling, enthusiastic go-getter.
• SSSS.Gridman because, aside from also having giant fun kaiju fights, it becomes a story about escaping an artificial/fake reality.
• I liked Sakuga Blog’s comparison to Kaiba too. The aesthetic of Deca-Dence‘s “other” world is one of the most interesting things about it: it’s cartoonish and cute, like a world populated by children’s toys, only to sweeten what’s actually a very harsh, dystopian existence. Just like Kaiba, it uses a “soft” aesthetic to subvert tone, resulting in an even more unsettling, dehumanising feel.

Anime fans reaction to Deca-Dence

The audience rating of 67% on AniList and 7.08 on MyAnimeList suggests to me a few things:

1. There was a lot of buzz when episode 2 of Deca-Dence aired, because it rather abruptly introduces the other world’s childish aesthetic (and indeed, the conspiracy behind it all). I can imagine a lot of anime fans felt tricked at this point, because it’s now suddenly oscillating between the worlds of Attack on Titan and Toy Story, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that anime fans like their anime to look like anime!
2. As a result, right now, Deca-Dence is underrated. In a summer season dominated by sequels that I couldn’t care less about, Deca-Dence just feels fresher.

Are you watching Deca-Dence? How do you feel about it? Let me know in the comments!

Put simply: to anime fans, characters are like God, and this show commits the sin of treating them like fodder.

It’s a story about Japan literally sinking into the ocean and 100+ million people being thrust into utter disarray. In such a situation, a lot of people will die, and a lot for really stupid reasons. Death is sometimes senseless, and this anime isn’t expecting you to cry for every single one. The death I’m thinking about, firstly, is Ayumu’s Dad. The anime wants you to see it from the family’s perspective: they’ve just lost their guiding light, but there’s no time for them to grieve, they are shell-shocked and their country is falling apart. He made a stupid decision in the heat of the moment. It may seem cheap for named characters to die so abruptly, like Nanami falling so suddenly to poison gas, but again, if it’s abrupt, it’s the anime simply trying to depict how fragile and helpless we are in the face of such a massive disaster. In other words, it’s supposed to be shocking and sensational. Would you be capable of rational thought as the world around you burns? The real moment of desolation was Ayumu’s Mum dying: only anime like Wolf’s Rain and Grave of the Fireflies have left me feeling so… lost and helpless. Her’s wasn’t a senseless death, or “cheap”, it was a hard, gutting moment that I will remember whenever I think about this series. Along with Haruo’s end, and the children being lost at sea, these were vivid, powerful and hard to watch scenes.

Finally, let’s talk about “realism”: I think it’s fair to say that this anime has cartoon logic. As is Yuasa’s want, it prefers to show rather than tell, and can be as silly as it is profound. It relies a lot on coincidence and whimsy: I mean, KITE literally flies down from the sky, as if sent by Yuasa himself, to save Ayumu and Go. Why get so caught up in the details? Not everything needs to be explained, not everything needs to be realistic. This is a weirdly upbeat post-apocalyptic anime. It’s okay to watch it and laugh. That doesn’t make it a bad anime. It’s trying to make you laugh! And it knows how silly it is, so why not go with it?

12 episodes later and…

…I dropped it, again!

At least I made it further than last time, which was half way through the first episode, but I think I’ve seen enough now to know that I’ll never get on with Re:ZERO.

My problems stem from the core aesthetic of the show: Re:ZERO is an anime made for anime fans, and it looks it. It’s about an avid gamer thrown into a fantasy world tasked with solving the problems of a conveyor belt of pretty anime girls. Sometimes they are elven princesses, other times they are maids, but one thing’s for sure, they are all cute, and they all need help. It’s knowingly iterating through a database of character types, giving them tragic backstories, and then tasking Subaru with helping them work through it all or die trying. Just like in a video game, if he dies, he has restore points from which he’s resurrected. He even comments on how it’s like a video game too, because he’s walking around using terms like NPC. I think a lot of people find this level of self awareness endearing, but it just feels artificial to me. This is transparently a story built around a series of tired anime stereotypes and drawn in a way to emphasise the innocence and daintiness of its female cast. Strong, charismatic men are a threat to Subaru’s total mediocrity, so there aren’t any. Which is to say, this isn’t like Berserk at all. But I’m not surprised that anime fans love Re:ZERO, that they have Rem for their desktop wallpapers, and figurines of Emilia. I’m also not surprised that it hasn’t garnered that same acclaim outside of anime fandom.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to bother writing about Re:ZERO, but then I started watching Japan Sinks: 2020 and it’s helped me contextualise why I like Masaaki Yuasa’s anime so much, why he’s now one of the most popular anime creators out there, and why I really didn’t like Re:ZERO. The thing is, Japan Sinks: 2020 wasn’t made for anime fans. It hasn’t been created to sell merchandise. No one will have Ayumu figurines, because no one is cute in Japan Sinks: 2020, especially the teenagers. They are frustrating, annoying and hard to watch, but I’m gripped nonetheless, because Yuasa’s default style is to reach beyond the superficial, traditional anime styles, just as his storytelling avoids anime archetypes, to create a universal aesthetic that can cross cultures.

My favourite character is Ayumu’s mother, Mari. She’s physically strong, strong enough to protect her family in the face of utter desolation, yet vulnerable enough to argue and cry with her brattish daughter. She’s an awesome person, basically, and she isn’t fetishised by the show at all. Yuasa’s aesthetic choices are somewhat restrained these days (compared to say, Kemonozume), but there’s still something of the chameleon about him and Science Saru: they build an aesthetic in service of a story as opposed to an industry, and an aesthetic that’s brave enough to be ugly if it means communicating authenticity. I’ve always loved that about Yuasa: he doesn’t make anime just for anime fans, he makes anime for everyone.

According to AniList, I’ve now watched 678 anime. To ascertain my own golden age, I took the 45 anime I’ve rated 9 or above, looked at their start years and it turns out…

2003-2005

…is my golden age.

Allow me to break this down a bit:

• 2003: Wolf’s Rain, Planetes, Kino’s Journey, Last Exile, Gungrave
• 2004: Samurai Champloo, Honey and Clover, Monster, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, Paranoia Agent, Mind Game
• 2005: MUSHI-SHI, Eureka Seven

To be honest, I was expecting something like 2007-2009, but in hindsight, these really were my formative years as an anime fan, the years that convinced me I was into something special and worth diving into.

I remember following the fansubs of Gungrave as it aired, reading the first anime blogs in 2004 for episodic reviews of Samurai Champloo and Monster, and finally started blogging for myself (in 2006) in response to the majesty of MUSHI-SHI: I just had to make sure everyone understood how good it was. By the time I’d started, everyone was already in love with Eureka Seven and telling me to watch it. Wolf’s Rain had Yoko Kanno at the very peak of her anime powers (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG aired in 2004, too!) and in Samurai Champloo, we had the last great anime from her most famous partner in crime, director Shinichiro Watanabe. Imagine how exciting it was to watch Gankutsuou as it aired, the sheer unmatched visual inspiration of it all! It really felt like anime was going to wreck the world! Since then, Kino’s Journey director (and fascinating auteur) Ryūtarō Nakamura passed, as well as the insanely talented Paranoia Agent director Satoshi Kon. They both made such interesting anime! Don’t take your anime heroes for granted, guys! And talking of anime heroes, Masaaki Yuasa’s career began in earnest with Mind Game in 2004. It seems strange to think it now, but Yuasa was basically ignored by anime fandom until The Tatami Galaxy finally woke them up.

Some of these are long overdue a revisit too: I wonder if Honey and Clover still holds up? It caught me at that perfect moment in my life: right between leaving university and entering into the adult world, and that’s what I mean about anime really. So much of it is geared towards young adults that we all reach a point where a lot of it, nostalgia aside, just cannot hit as hard as it used to, because we all get older, see and feel things differently, and that’s the risk with rewatching your favourites, realising that a classic like Honey and Clover isn’t actually all that!?!

Thank you for joining me on this trip down memory lane! What is your personal anime golden age?

It concludes with Rikuo falling into the arms of Haru, a girl he barely knew and has shown nothing but disdain for over the course of the series, and with his old flame Shinako knocking on the door of her dead boyfriend’s younger brother, implying that she’s pursuing a doomed relationship with him. It’s sad because up until this point, it felt like Rikuo and Shinako had learnt something from each other: they tried to get together, but eventually realised that there was nothing between them, just two lonely souls searching for a respite from the cold. And just as it felt like they had finally reached a turning point, the epilogue reverts them: Shinako is still trapped in the past, and Rikuo is chasing an immature relationship based almost entirely on Haru’s infatuation with him. 

I suppose some people just don’t get to grow.

Maybe that’s the real message of Sing “Yesterday” for Me? That some people just stay broken?

Aesthetic

Sing “Yesterday” for Me is a nostalgic anime. Based on a manga series that began in 1997, it’s set in the era just before the internet took hold and fundamentally changed the world. Isn’t it weirdly reassuring seeing Rikuo and Shinako chained to their home phones, their fingers nervously twiddling about their phone cords? Or everytime Rikuo lights up a cigarette in public, just smoking to chill out. In my opinion, the aesthetic is the best character of Sing “Yesterday” for Me, eliciting the kind of feeling to suggest I’m watching an anime based on a coffee- stained Haruki Murakami novel like Norwegian Wood, a slow and atmospheric wandering through a time and place. 

It reminds me a lot of Welcome to the N.H.K., similarly a story of a bunch of young adults so haunted by their pasts that they are scared to take the next step forwards. Rikuo isn’t nearly as broken as Satou, but both find themselves in love with the memory of a girl, only to realise that when they meet the real person, their love was always one sided and empty, a sad trick of nostalgia. 

There’s an undeniable sense of ennui about Rikuo and Shinako, a melancholy that bleeds into every scene, be it the blue moonlight as Rikuo throws out the trash, the warm glow of the streetlights as he bumps into Haru, or the flash of a speeding train as it passes Shinako, her head down on her way home from work, there’s something just slow and lonely about Sing “Yesterday” for Me, an overriding feeling of inertia as life just passes by. It’s a story told through what isn’t said.

Being brave enough to fail: Rikuo

It takes a brave person to follow their dreams when it means risking failure. We’re all the greatest in our own minds, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people just never have the wherewithal to try and make something happen. It’s always a half hearted effort and there’s always an excuse for not trying. The Rikuo at the beginning of Sing “Yesterday” for Me is a good example of a half hearted guy that hasn’t given himself a chance because he’s afraid to fail, the part time gigs just another way of delaying the moment when he’s forced to look himself in the mirror and ask what he’s going to do with his life. A lot of stories would climax with him working up the determination to confess to Shinako, but episode 1 ends with him confessing his feelings to her, only to be turned down. It really feels like he’s trying to live with no regrets, knowing that it’s a moment in his life that he’ll regret forever if he doesn’t at least tell her how he feels. That she turns him down should finally give him the impetus to grow and set forth on a new path, but this is where Sing “Yesterday” for Me really begins.

Letting go of the past: Shinako

Like Rikuo, Shinako is a person struggling with inertia. She’s still in love with her long dead boyfriend, but rather than put distance between herself and his family and try to move on, she’s closer to his family now than ever. Rō, her dead boyfriend’s younger brother, is clearly infatuated with her and forcefully pursues a relationship. She knows it’s unhealthy and wrong, and that she’s torturing Rō as much as herself by hanging on, but even still, she can’t seem to bring herself to separate from them. A running theme with Shinako is her lack of decisiveness, and it hurts everyone around her. The phrase “it’s better to be cruel than kind” never applied more to a person. If only she could let go of Rō.

Explaining why the ending of Sing “Yesterday” for Me is a betrayal

The ending of Sing “Yesterday” for Me feels like a betrayal because it concludes on a tone-deaf ostensibly happy note that falls apart the moment you stop to think about it. It never felt like Rikuo loved Haru, just as it never felt like Shinako loved Rō. Both relationships are built on deeply unhealthy foundations: Haru falling in love with Rikuo after bumping into him in the street without knowing anything about him, and Rō wanting to replace his older brother in Shinako’s eyes, something that he can never hope to do. Both relationships seem totally one sided, and characterise the deep sense of emptiness and loss that Rikuo and Shinako both seemed so desperate to escape, yet are apparently doomed to repeat. I just thought Sing “Yesterday” for Me was braver than this.

Anyway, I figured I’d watch Smile Down the Runway since it seemed like a series with good reviews that I’d overlooked in the Winter season, whilst A Place Further than the Universe, one of the most beloved anime of the past few years, needs no introduction. Why did I wait so long to watch it? I suppose I needed to be in the right mood, and 2020 is definitely that!

Here’s my brief thoughts.

Smile Down the Runway (2020)

At first glance, people will assume that Smile Down the Runway is blonde model Chiyuki’s story, I certainly had that impression, only to realise that it’s clothes designer Ikuto’s story after all, and what a pleasant boy he is. I wish I had more than that to say about Smile Down the Runway, it’s a unique shonen anime set in what I’ve always thought of as a feminine world, where the artistic trumps strength, and whose main character is a sensitive and softly-spoken young man, alas, I’m already forgetting everything about it.

A Place Further than the Universe (2018)

I’m in the UK, I’ve been working from home since March and I’ve always thought to that, when the pandemic clears up, things will go back to normal again, but I’m starting to doubt that now. For sure, I took being able to travel for granted. I haven’t seen enough of the world yet, and the longer this goes on for, the more distant the rest of the world feels. A Place Further than the Universe was released in 2018, but those 2 years may as well be a lifetime ago. This is an anime about 4 high school girls travelling from Japan to Antarctica, and this past week, I watched it for the first time. There’s a lot I could say, but mostly, it made me want to travel and see other, distant places. I don’t know if I’ll ever see an aurora, or even stay in such a remote, icy place, but just seeing another landscape is enough, a salve for the soul. A Place Further than the Universe is that rare thing: an anime that, with each passing episode, I began to savour.

Phew!

Given the state of the things in the world right now, with so many of us living in isolation, we need anime now more than ever, and it’s delivering guys.

We all need escapism, to let ourselves go wander in other worlds. Like dreams, anime can help us process reality in abstract ways, to make sense of how we’re feeling at a deeper level than simply watching the news all day and feeling like the world’s collapsing around us. Read, watch, play: give yourself a break, and take care!

My Spring 2020 anime season rankings

Ordered in terms of personal preference, this is how I’ve ended up ranking things, but there’s not a bad anime amongst them:

1. Sing “Yesterday” for Me
2. BNA
3. Listeners
4. Gleipnir
5. The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED
6. Appare-Ranman!
7. Wave, Listen to Me!
8. Kakushigoto
9. Tower of God

At the time of writing, I’m intending to keep up with 8 of the above during the next few months, but I don’t have much hope that I’ll last the pace with all of them! (4 anime in a season is about all I can manage!)

This anime blog in 2020

At the beginning of the year (gosh, that seems so long ago now!), I sat down and reviewed the blog’s raw visitor stats. They had been in a slow decline for years and the question has always been if I could arrest the slide (Aside from, you know, actually posting regularly and not disappearing for months or years on end?).

We anime bloggers are a funny bunch and trust me, I’m the same, there’s a large part of me that resents caring about things like blog views; I’ll just write what I want, and if people want to read it or not, why should I care? Well, the flip side to that argument is that, of course, I want to be read, this is a public website after all, so why should anime fans care about whatever random thing is running through my mind? When you follow that line of thought to its natural conclusion, you must accept the idea that “I’ll write what I want” is not (often) compatible with wanting to be read, it just isn’t. You must separate yourself from your ego and look at the raw data.

(Minor digression: If you’re interested in reading more about anime blogging, Irina’s blog has a number of fascinating posts on the subject. My blog right now is an island, it has been for years, but that’s a conscious decision, if just because I think being a “connected” blogger can lead one down a path of writing for a select audience of bloggers instead of anime fans. That definitely happened to me.)

From 2018 to the end of 2019, my most read post was “Seriously?! The end of Banana Fish“. From my perspective, there’s nothing particularly special about that post’s content, it’s just a visceral reaction to Banana Fish‘s gut-punch of an ending. Why was it more popular than the others? Well, it’s obvious when you think about it. People finish Banana Fish, go looking for a shoulder to cry on and, completely by accident, I’d given that post a title that made it easy to find.

Long story short: the raw data told me two things, people wanted me to write about anime endings and first episodes, hence that’s what I’m doing with this blog in 2020, I’m really trying, and the results so far have been promising, the views having tripled in as many months. Of course, there’s still a part of me that resents it, screaming that I’m above all of this, that I’m compromising myself in this way, but the truth is much simpler than that. I’m still searching for my voice, and now I’m going back to basics to find it. I can only hope that you’re enjoying the journey with me?

Is the Listeners anime any good?

Watching Listeners feels like a trip down memory lane. The furtive boy finds a girl with amnesia and, together, they set out on a romantic adventure that carries them far from home.

Also, she pilots a giant robot.

If you’ve been an anime fan for more than a few years, you’ll know that there’s nothing original going on here, but that didn’t stop Listeners from melting my defenceless heart anyway.

I loved every minute of this, but then I loved Eureka Seven too, and Listeners is very much the spiritual successor to Eureka Seven, right down to the blatant Brit Pop references. More than that, it’s the chemistry between Echo (the boy) and Myū (the girl) that really gets me: earnest, heartfelt, a mutual respect for each other? Whatever it is, it’s just like Renton and Eureka, and I’m so glad.

You’ll join me for this trip down memory lane, won’t you?

Stray notes on Listeners

• So, the Eureka Seven comparisons are obvious, but why is it so similar? Dai Satō is the man to blame. He co-created Eureka Seven and it’s looking like he’s had a similarly influential hand in Listeners too.
• Dai Satō loves his music: the first episode is titled “Live Forever”, no doubt named after the famous Oasis song, meanwhile, Echo’s sister runs an inn literally called “Oasis”. There’s clear references to other musical artists too, Jimi Hendrix and Uriah Heep to name just two.
• In actual fact, it’s more than just references, music is written into the very core of Listeners‘ story: the monument at the peak of Echo’s trash dump looks like a musical note and the ignition to trigger Myū’s powers is plugging into a guitar amp.
• Suddenly, I’m thinking about FLCL too!!
• Quite often anime writers can become just as, if not more, famous than directors. Mari Okada, Gen Urobuchi and Keiko Nobumoto are three that, like Dai Satō, can sell an anime series on their names alone.

Is the Appare-Ranman! anime any good?

Set in what seems like the late 18th, early 19th century, an era when technology was accelerating and bringing with it an unshakable sense of optimism, two young men wash up in the booming US from a then scientifically backwards Japan. On their way over, set adrift at sea, one of the men, the genius Appare, looks at the moon and marvels that one day, Man will set foot on it. You realise at that point that Appare-Ranman! will be a story of adventure and wonder. Is it any good? Sure! I’m certainly going to keep on watching!

Stray notes on Appare-Ranman!

• Shonen anime connections: the main character, Appare, is an awkward scientific genius much like Senku from Dr. Stone, and is voiced by Natsuki Hanae, also the voice of Tanjirō from Demon Slayer.
• I hope I’m not the only one to think of Redline during the racing scenes in Appare-Ranman!? If you haven’t seen the rocket-fueled Redline yet, you really should, it’s a cracking film similarly constructed around an anything goes wacky race.
• Indeed, there was a very real car race across America. Called the Cannonball Run, it ran five times in the Seventies, and was totally illegal and probably quite dangerous.
• Appare-Ranman! is an original anime from P.A. Works. I always seem to associate P.A. Works with well animated yet same-face-cute-girl anime like Hanasaku Iroha and True Tears, but every once in a while, they seem willing to experiment with different aesthetics. The Eccentric Family was great example of that, and one thing’s for sure, Appare-Ranman! is fun to look at.

The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED delayed due to Coronavirus

16th April 2020: From the third episode onwards, The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED has been delayed until further notice due to the spread of the Coronavirus. The second episode that aired this week will be the series’ last until further notice after Japan declared a national state of emergency earlier today.

Plot summary

Haru Katō’s boring life as a recently demoted police officer shifts into the fast lane when he meets the haughty Millionaire Detective Daisuke Kambe, an enigmatic force of nature, speeding down the road. Kambe has literally unlimited funds at his disposal and is happy payoff everyone whose life (and property) he destroys in pursuit of his prey, but Haru isn’t one to be bought off.

Is the The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED anime any good?

It was a fun and satisfying debut that I really hope continues in this vein of episodic hijinks and inventive action at the same time as chipping away at the layers of Kambe’s high falutin personality. It feels in many ways like a throwback to late Nineties anime like The Big O and Cowboy Bebop, albeit with a less masculine and more homoerotic subtext for the Noughties. I loved the little subplot involving the two hapless and hopeless jewelry robbers and the elegant way their misfortune was woven into the episode’s mad climax.

Stray notes on The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED

• The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED is based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. His name should be familiar with anime fans, because he also wrote Paprika and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Not bad, eh?
• Tsutsui wrote Millionaire Detective in 1978. Apparently, there was a JDrama adaptation in 2005. Curiously, in that version, Kanbe is female! I’ve no idea which version of Kanbe is true to the novel.
• The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED is airing in the well known Noitamina TV block in Japan. Noitamina is not as big a deal as it used to be, but I’m nevertheless grateful for my hit of josei anime with adult characters. Thank you, Noitamina!
• From my experience, anime based on novels (caveat: not light novels!) tend to be good. I can imagine that if you’re a character designer or animator, it’s much more interesting to work on an anime series that doesn’t already have a set aesthetic.
• I’ve read comparisons of The Millionaire Detective – Balance: UNLIMITED to James Bond and Batman, but I’m going to throw in a couple of anime that I thought of when I was watching it: Cowboy Bebop, particularly the more light hearted episodes that climax with collisions of seemingly random people, and the lazy metropolitan office life of ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept..

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Plot summary

By night, Kakushi Gotō is the doting (single) father of a young girl.

By day, he’s a published ecchi manga artist (indeed, that most honourable of professions!) And yet he’s unbelievably ashamed of his job and will leave no stone unturned to hide it from his precious girl!

Is the Kakushigoto anime any good?

What a dense episode! Part manga industry satire, part family drama, Kakushigoto is a wholesome Dad anime that plays with the notions of propriety and responsibility that come with being a respectable parent versus with the reality of making your living from a manga with a name like “Tights in the Wind”. It’s full of jokes and jabs at popular manga (Attack on Titan, take a bow!), and left me feeling warm and happy. It has a lovely, vibrant aesthetic too.

Stray notes on Kakushigoto

• The Kakushigoto anime is based on a manga by Kōji Kumeta, author of dark comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve heard it’s quite good?
• Kōji Kumeta loves a pun. According to a post on Reddit, the main character’s name (Gotou Kakushi) is a pun with multiple meanings: “secret/something hidden” and “drawing/writing job”. It seems like all of the characters were named with a pun in mind!
• I pride myself on being able to read subtitles pretty fast, but even I had to pause this episode a few times to catch up. It’s chaotic and full of energy.
• I couldn’t tell you how often anime acts as a springboard to dive into the deeper waters of Japanese pop culture, which is to say, I’d somehow lived my life until this very day without ever hearing an Eiichi Ohtaki track and now I feel like I’ve just opened a treasure-chest! What a voice! Eiichi Ohtaki’s song, “Kimi wa Tenneniro (君は天然色)“, is the ending song for Kakushigoto. If, like me, you sense a classic vibe to his music, it’s because Ohtaki was mostly active in the Seventies and Eighties. He sadly passed in 2013, but from all accounts, he left behind an amazing discography.
• Want more Dad anime? Barakamon is really good!

What did you make of Kakushigoto?

Plot summary

Shuichi has a secret: that, for some unknown reason, he’s suddenly able to transform into a monster. He also has… urges. Dead animals, girls, danger. He can sense them all, intensely so, and has trouble resisting them.

Is the Gleipnir anime any good?

Before seeing this, I must admit I’d picked up the odd murmuring that Gleipnir starts weird and only gets weirder. This first episode pings between being a fascinating psychological thriller and a creepy erotic comedy. It has the “boy getting caught staring at a girl’s panties scene” that’s been repeated in anime ad infinitum, but then also has the classic “adrenaline-fueled giant teddy bear on the verge of sexually assaulting a girl” scene. A girl that later turns out to be something of a suicidal psychopath. Yup. Where this is all headed is anyone’s guess, but since I’m partial to a messy sexual apocalypse, let’s see how far Gleipnir dares to go.

Stray notes on Gleipnir

• I couldn’t help but compare Gleipnir to Flowers of Evil (Aku no Hana). Claire dominates Shuichi like Nakamura does Kasuga, exploiting both his lust and his shame to bend him to her will. The secret they share, that he nearly raped her, is akin to Nakamura catching Kasuga stealing girls’ gym clothes. From this point on, just as in Flowers of Evil, she can break him down, right to his very core.
• The word “Gleipnir” is from Norse mythology: it is the chain that binds “the mighty wolf Fenrir”. Who is Gleipnir in this story? Considering how Claire dominates Shuichi, I suppose it’s her, with him cast as Fenrir.
• After Interspecies Reviewers was pulled from streaming last season, you would’ve thought that Funimation had had enough of such risque, sexually charged anime?

What did you think of Gleipnir‘s first episode? Anime doesn’t get much stranger than this, does it?

Plot summary

Rikuo’s graduated from school, but doesn’t know what to do with his life. Working part-time in a grocery store, he’s watching his friends leave town, one by one. Time just won’t stop ticking.

Is the Sing “Yesterday” for Me anime any good?

Sing “Yesterday” for Me is an easy anime to love and, quite frankly, I fell pretty hard for it. It’s about a bunch of jaded adults facing the reality that the world is indifferent to their needs, that we aren’t all destined to work our dream jobs, and that our childhood crushes will pass us by. Realising this is hard, but is also empowering, because if you can accept that there are no promises in life, you should understand that your life, your success, your love, is in your own hands. You have to make of it what you can.

Sing “Yesterday” for Me anime notes

• Crunchyroll translated Rikuo’s description of himself as a “loafer”, but I think “Freeter” is a better word for Rikuo’s life. Isn’t it interesting that Japan has a number of specific words to categorise struggling adults?
• Last summer, I re-watched Welcome to the NHK, which, if you haven’t seen it, is a much darker companion piece to Sing “Yesterday” for Me. The main character, Satou, is a hikikomori who dropped out to school and won’t leave his apartment.
• I recently read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, which is about a young man of a similar age to Rikuo, torn between his love for two women. It deals with depression, suicide and coming to terms with life as an adult when there are no set paths to follow.
• The Sing “Yesterday” for Me anime will have 18 episodes (an odd number for an anime series, no?). It is based on an 11 volume manga that ran between 1997 and 2015.

How did you feel about Sing “Yesterday” for Me? Did it hit you as hard as it did me?

Plot summary

Recently divorced waitress Minare spends an evening complaining about her ex, at great speed, to the random man that’s sat next to her in a restaurant. As fate would have it, he’s a radio producer, and he’s so amused by her story, or more specially, the deranged way that she tells it, that he throws her on-air to vent.

Is the Wave, Listen to Me! anime any good?

It takes time to get used to the sheer amount of words being spat forth by Minare: she isn’t the quiet, retiring type, but by the end, I was sold. She’s an endearing mess of an adult with a gale-force ability to rant. Wave, Listen to Me! reminded me of how I felt at first about the rakugo scenes in Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju; all of those weirdly long, meandering monologues, that slowly but surely pull us in. Over the episode, we’re dragged into Minare’s world: the world of a hungover and bitter adult, looking to regain some momentum in her life. Aren’t we all?

Wave, Listen to Me! anime production notes

I can’t say I knew this was an adaptation of a Hiroaki Samura manga, but suffice to say, I was pleasantly surprised! Only last weekend did I publish my end-of-series review of Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, a story that couldn’t be further from Wave, Listen to Me!! And yet here we are, 1 week later and another 12 episodes of a Hiroaki Samura anime to look forward to!

Speaking of odd fits, of all the anime studios out there to animate this, a comedy about a bunch of middle aged radio jockeys, Sunrise, the Gundam studio, would’ve been my last guess. I can’t complain though, they did a competent job, and lest we forget, Cowboy Bebop was animated by Sunrise too.

Finally, I just wanted to add that if you enjoyed Wave, Listen to Me!, I really recommend tracking down the live action Japanese film, Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald: a heartwarming comedy set in, you guessed it, a radio studio! It was almost certainly an influence on Wave, Listen to Me!.

Plot summary

Best friends Bam and Rachel are living in (assumed) poverty underground when, one day, Rachel is spirited away to the Tower of God. In the Tower, it is said a person’s dreams can come true, but it is also a dangerous place where many people die. Bam forces his way in after her, determined to find his friend…

Is the Tower of God anime any good?

It’s complicated. I’ve been mulling this over for a few days now.

Given that I’ve read the first 50 episodes of the webtoon, I knew what to expect from the Tower of God and, to be honest, this first episode felt faithful enough.

In whatever form, this is a messy story, filled with anachronistic touches, that’s somehow still quite addictive.

What I mean by anachronistic is, if Bam and Rachel were living underground for so long, why don’t they look more like morlocks? Why is Bam dressed so well? There’s lots of questions like this. One senses that the writer of this story, SIU, began as an amateur and just wanted his characters to start climbing the tower as soon as possible. It has that same earnest yet unpolished vibe as Sword Art Online, which similarly began in the writer’s bedroom, and all of these little leaps in logic add up to the Tower of God feeling like a quite frustrating watch. And yet!

There’s so much mystery and exciting action to keep things interesting. It is a shonen anime through and through, built around the classic tournament formula, with a growing cast of eccentric students, each with their own backstories and reasons for entering the tower, climbing it together.

Tower of God anime production notes

As ever, when any anime dares to look a bit different, I read a few complaints about the art and animation looking cheap or unfinished. To my eye, the Tower of God anime looks more like a homage to the aesthetic of the webtoon than anything else. This is just how SIU drew his story, thick, messy-lines and all, and the anime is staying true to that. I really like it. The little touches of quality, like the anime taking the time to animate the condensation of Bam and Rachel’s warm breath, are all there.

Kevin Penkin’s soundtrack, summoning the spirit of his Made in Abyss quality, is the most unequivocally great thing about this Tower of God anime, conjuring the magic and mystique unfolding before Bam’s eyes as he enters the strange new world of the Tower.

pet

(dropped, first ep. review)

I’m surprised to learn I watched 7 episodes of the ineffectual pet before dropping it. It was a poor anime series devoid of engaging characters that I’m likely to forget even existed.

ID: INVADED

(dropped, first ep. review)

I spent 6 episodes working hard to keep up with ID: INVADED before realising it wasn’t worth the effort: weighed-down with technobabble and the animation quality took a disheartening dive.

Somali and the Forest Spirit

(dropped, first ep. review)

Somali and the Forest Spirit was an easy-going watch but I wasn’t getting anything out of it. The anime equivalent of jam on toast: a sweet treat, but I wanted a hearty meal.

Interspecies Reviewers

(on hold, editorial)

I watched the first 3 episodes of Interspecies Reviewers to see how risque it was. It turns out: very. Not sure yet if I’m going to keep going.

HAIKYU TO THE TOP

(still watching, first ep. review)

A cours worth of volleyball training and then just as the National Tournament begins, goes on hiatus until July. Not the best season of Haikyu!! but then not every season can be a blockbuster.

Winter 2020 best anime

Dorohedoro

(still watching, first ep. review, editorial)

I love the upside-down horror world of Dorohedoro, where extreme violence and black comedy go hand in hand. I’ve only seen 3 episodes, but I’m really impressed.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

(completed, first ep. review, editorial)

An unrelentingly optimistic and inspiring anime about making anime, from the maestro Masaaki Yuasa, full of life and imagination.

Blade of the Immortal

(completed, review)

A condensed version of a great samurai manga that nevertheless captured the insane, violent and beautiful world of Tokugawa shogunate-era Japan.

How did you find the Winter 2020 anime season? Have I missed anything that you thought was unmissable?

Strange beginnings

I think it’s fair to say that Blade of the Immortal has an extreme beginning: I’m thinking of Sabato Kuroi, with the severed heads of Rin’s mother and his ex-wife sewn to his shoulders like a villain in a horror film, to name but one totally reprehensible guy in first handful of episodes. Someone like Kuroi doesn’t fit in with how we come to view the Ittō-ryū later on or what their leader Kagehisa Anotsu stands for, because being a good fighter doesn’t also give you license to be a sadistic monster, but at this early point, it’s like creator Hiroaki Samura wasn’t sure of what he was going for. I’m not convinced that the Anotsu at the end of Blade of the Immortal would’ve allowed what happens to Rin’s mother at the beginning, but it remains the underlying justification for Rin’s revenge until the end anyway. Which is all to say, it gets better, I promise!

The horrifying human experimentation/prison arc

Things get pretty crazy when the immortal Manji is abducted by the Shogunate and subjected to a prolonged onslaught of dismemberments in an underground, hidden prison, a grim place that echoes Japan’s real WWII-era Unit 731, an infamous project that inflicted violent experiments on prisoners of war. In a story that’s filled with heartless acts of violence, I found this run of episodes to be the hardest to watch, but also the most powerful. The prisoners, faces masked, are brought in, dismembered and then exposed to Manji’s healing blood worms. They keep dying, so more prisoners are brought in, their lives flitted away, as the Chief Doctor slowly loses his mind trying to find the secret to Manji’s immortality.

Japan’s beautiful countryside

Like Dororo and Rurouni Kenshin, Blade of the Immortal is another chanbara story that depicts a violent and merciless Japan that’s also vibrant and lovely. Manji and Rin travel through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and as the story finally begins to climax, the snow begins to fall, dusting everything, from forest to harbor, in white. It looks so cold, and so beautiful.

Japan, you realise, is a fascinating character all of its own in Blade of the Immortal.

The strong side characters: Makie & Hyakurin

Blade of the Immortal was always Rin and Manji’s story, but along the way, it intertwines with the others. I have to mention the tragic Makie, a fighter without peer, whose style is elegant and balletic. She’s a pure, almost supernatural talent, with a fateful presence and melancholy expression, as if living her life knowing where it all ends yet cannot do a thing to change it.

In comparison, Hyakurin, with her loud bleached hair, has some of the worst treatment of any woman in this story, is sexually assaulted and degraded (indeed, by the end, she’s carrying a child conceived through rape) and yet she remains strong and never gives up. For her to survive in this heartless world, despite being a frail, flesh and blood person, shows how admirable she is.

90 years later: Blade of the Immortal’s ending

After Rin finally finishes off Anotsu, her and Manji part ways. I thought that this would be it, but the epilogue begins some 90 years later, in 1873, with Manji still alive and looking like he’s hardly aged a day, as Japan rapidly modernises in the wake of the Meiji Restoration.

He’s so old now that he can hardly remember Rin or the Ittō-ryū, but his memories are rekindled when he meets a little girl that turns out to be Rin’s great-great grandchild. She hands him a small knife, the very knife given to Rin by little Doa, with its wooden hilt carved with a pattern that is supposed to be Manji’s symbol wreathed in Rin’s flame. Passed down through the generations of her family, they were told that it should be given to the person that matches Manji’s image. All those years ago, Doa told Rin that she should carve the knife’s hilt herself, and give it to the person that she loves.

How successful was the 2019 anime?

It’s fair to say I was hyped for 2019’s Blade of the Immortal anime, but did it live up to my high expectations?

I have to say “Yes!” but let’s not go overboard with the praise either, because this was not a smooth anime series by any means. It was a competent adaptation from a director in Hiroshi Hamasaki whose body-horror sensibilities and penchant for Dezaki esque postcard memories are a perfect match for heady seinen chanbara carnage like Blade of the Immortal, yet it suffers for trying to compress 205+ chapters of manga into 24 episodes of anime. There’s not nearly enough time to get it all on-screen, and as such, one is sometimes bewildered as intricate character motivations are lost in the rush to get to the end.

So, it isn’t the definitive Blade of the Immortal anime I was hoping for, but even still, it’s a great accompaniment to Hiroaki Samura’s beautifully drawn manga, has a lovely soundtrack, and is well worth watching for any adults fascinated by Japan’s era of samurai.

Plot summary

The world is split between humans and anthropomorphic creatures called beastmen. Humans hate the beastmen, whose lives are made miserable everywhere but Anima City, where they can live without fear of being hunted by blood-thirsty mobs of humans. Even still, the peace in Anima City is fragile: in the middle of a festival, a bomb is planted. Into the middle of all this walks the tanuki Michiru, enjoying her first taste of Anima City, and Shirou Ogami, a wolf with a strong sense of justice.

Is it any good?

The latest anime from Studio Trigger couldn’t be any less than good, could it? Just look at how gorgeous the lighting and colour palette for BNA is. I really love how it looks. It’s such a fully realised and immersive world, a clear different class to most anime. One gets a strong Devilman vibe from it too, given that both play up the racial tensions and the heartlessness of a mob mentality: watching Shirou rip the antlers off the head of a deer turned against its own kind simply sealed the deal (what a great action scene, by the way!)

What are you worried about?

I haven’t found the time to watch director Yoh Yoshinari‘s Little Witch Academia yet, which I know is highly regarded, but story-wise, seems to skew younger than I typically enjoy in anime. I just hope that the writing in BNA is as rousing and emotional as it is fun, and to be fair, writer Kazuki Nakashima is particularly good at this type of balancing act, with his past works like Gurren Lagann a great example of how a cartoon-ish, elastic aesthetic can be just as emotional as it is fun. Truthfully, I’m not worried at all. I think BNA is going to be a cracking anime series.

(So, “Where can I watch BNA?” you should be asking yourself right now. Netflix, my dear boy, is the answer. And, as always, pack a tin of beans or two, because you’ll be waiting for a while. Alas, the first 6 episodes have already aired in Japan and you should know where to go if you want to watch this, but only if you’re a bad, bad person like me.)

“I realised something working on it. That to me, life is about working on stuff like this. And there’s nothing I can do about that, now.”

I was still at school when I realised what I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to make websites. I was never worried about it, I never questioned it, it was just what I was going to do. Like Tsubame drawing on her tablet deep into the night, I’d find myself writing code at every opportunity, my dark room lit by the computer’s screen, totally immersed. This played out again and again. Sometimes without even realising it, you’re doing it because you love it, because there’s a deep part of yourself being nourished, like a sun that’s always shining, it becomes something that you don’t want to let go.

I often ask myself, was I born to do this? Was Tsubame born to be an animator? What would I have done 200 years ago? I don’t believe in fate or destiny, yet we fit into niches that never used to exist. Life is mysterious like that.

Tsubame asks her parents, “What did you think of my animation?” You often read people saying, “Art for arts sake” but I think that’s misleading. Creation is a form of expression, an expression that’s crying out to be acknowledged. Something can be so abstract, yet so personal, like Tsubame lovingly animating the movement behind the way her Granny threw the dregs of her tea away, it’s such an innocuous thing, yet intensely personal, and after everything, to simply hear someone say, “that was good,” can be so gratifying, as if validating your very existence. Scary too, of course, because you’re painting so much of yourself into it, but that’s the risk you take. It’s the humanity between the lines that connects us.

I write this at a turning point in my life, as I question the road behind me and the mystery that lays ahead. Tsubame’s sense of purpose is something that will dim over time. Nothing lasts forever. But even still, I remember feeling like that, and as I search for the next spark to light the way ahead, this little show has kept me warm at the roadside.

What is the Tower of God?

The Tower of God is an ongoing story that began life as a webtoon in 2010, created by Lee Jong-hwi (aka SIU). In it, Bam enters the titular Tower at the lowest level, in search of his friend, Rachel, who dreams of reaching the top and seeing the beautiful starry night sky from its summit. If only it were so easy: you have to fight your way to the top of the tower, one level at time, each bringing with it a massive learning curve and life-threatening tests.

What is a webtoon? Is it like manga?

Webtoons have their origins in South Korea and if the Tower of God is anything to go by, they are like manga in the sense that they are visually inspired by the aesthetics and storytelling of manga, but whereas manga is conceived to be a physical, print media first, webtoons are designed for digital readers.

Practically, what does this mean? Well, webtoons are published in long vertical strips that constantly scroll down. This makes them perfect to read on mobile devices and tablets.

They are also said to include short animated sequences and sounds, but I’ve only read the Tower of God so far and that’s been static images only as of episode 30 (another thing: webtoons have ‘episodes’ rather than ‘chapters’).

This is, in many ways, how I’ve always wanted to consume manga. Webtoons are a glimpse of a bright new future, created by the next generation of authors, born to publish their works online.

The popular medium for publishing webtoons is Line Webtoon and, crucially, all of the webtoons (including Tower of God) on their platform are (legally) free. They have excellent apps for iOS and Android devices, which, given what I’ve outlined above, are a perfect way to experience this new medium. I’ve spent the weekend reading Tower of God on my phone and iPad, and loved every minute of it. Pretty damn exciting, right? Please do recommend me some other webtoons!

Is Tower of God any good?

As of episode 30, yes, the Tower of God really good. What gets me first is that initial hook: Bam enters the tower at the lowest level and has to fight his way to the top, one level at a time. Each level brings with it its own set of challenges, be it a brutal battle royale (the first test is simple, out of 400 hopefuls, only 200 will be allowed through to the next stage, therefore they fight until only 200 are left alive) or a strange mind game (each team is placed in a room with 12 doors, of which only 1 will lead to the next level, the other 11 leading to certain death.)

As we travel deeper though, there’s a lot more to the Tower of God than just tests. Bam begins all of this to chase after his dearest friend, Rachel, who enters the Tower of her own free will because she dreams of seeing the beautiful sky at its summit. Yet Bam wants nothing more than to be by her side, no matter where that may be, even if that means never seeing the sky and living in abject poverty.

Is it better to reach for the stars, to set out to try and achieve your dreams, or to stay humble and to live out your life in obscurity, surrounded by friends and family? Such is the conflict at the heart of Rachel and Bam’s relationship, such are the questions we all face in our lives at some point: to dream, to aspire, to be happy.

What do we know about the Tower of God anime?

On the 6th of February, it was announced that the Tower of God would have an anime adaptation and that it will begin airing in April 2020 (that’s right, the forthcoming Spring season!). Other than that, all we know right now is that it will be streaming in Japan, South Korea, and the US. Whoever is behind this project, they did a great job of keeping it secret for so long!

No doubt, more information will be revealed as we draw ever closer to its debut, and I’ll endeavor to keep this post updated. In the meantime, why not read the webtoon?

Update 1: 25th February, including Tower of God anime trailer!

We now know a bit more.

• The Tower of God anime will be animated by TELECOM ANIMATION FILM (aka TMS Entertainment), who are mostly known for their work on various Lupin anime and Aikatsu!. We still don’t have specific staff credits, though.
• The above was announced by the anime streaming site Crunchyroll, with Tower of God being described as a “Crunchyroll Original”. Suffice to say, it will be streaming worldwide on their site.
• The full Tower of God anime trailer is embedded below. It looks pretty good, you guys! The animation is fluid and it feels like they have nailed the atmosphere.

Update 2: 4th April

• Check out my review of the first episode of the Tower of God anime.
• Staff working on the anime includes the musical composer Kevin Penkin, who made the superb soundtrack for the Made in Abyss anime.
• It has been confirmed by Crunchyroll that the Tower of God anime will be 13 episodes long. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be a second season.

What is Interspecies Reviewers?

Based on a manga that began serialisation in 2016, Interspecies Reviewers isn’t trying to pretend that it’s anything other than a horny anime about sex.

A human, an elf and an angel set out to have (consensual) sex with as many magical species of sex worker as they can find: fairies, minotaurs, catgirls, even slimegirls, nothing is off the table. Each is then reviewed and given a score out of 10.

Interspecies Reviewers is literally that blunt.

Is it so explicit?

By anime’s standards, yes, especially if you catch the uncensored episodes, but to call it hentai or pornography is wrong: by those standards, The Handmaiden or The Shape of Water deserve the same treatment.

Of the three episodes I’ve seen, there’s any number of (really flipping crazy) sex scenes in Interspecies Reviewers, but it didn’t feel pornographic to me, more like a (very) erotic comedy.

Anime is so typically sexually-repressed and chaste that to see such a sex positive series like Interspecies Reviewers is a little strange and maybe a little intimidating too.

Hello censorship my old friend

I watched the heavily censored version of Interspecies Reviewers being streamed by Funimation. Episodes 1 and 2 were okay, but in episode 3, sex scenes were entirely blacked-out. I suppose they gave up at this point. It was to be the last episode streamed by Funimation, but one has to ask, what ever did they expect in the first place? It’s like censoring the volleyball in Haikyuu!!, totally ridiculous.

And the larger question: why is any anime being censored in this day and age? Is it because someone believes our fragile minds can’t take whatever it is that’s being hidden? Or is it just a cynical attempt to sell an ‘uncensored’ version? Blood, sex, cigarettes, all things that are often censored in anime. It’s a mess.

What happens now?

Piracy is what happens.

Allow me to digress for a moment, but in the Nineties, The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were banned in the UK to protect us, the general British public, from being scared senseless. It was illegal to own them in this country. That seems so unbelievable now.

Interspecies Reviewers was cancelled by Funimation, but that doesn’t mean that Interspecies Reviewers ceases to exist, only that Funimation are being prudish. Wakanim and AnimeLab are continuing to stream it in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, but, if you’re in the US, Canada, UK or Ireland, your only option now is the old way: fansubs. They will lead you to the uncensored versions, at least.

After all that, is it worth the effort?

I’m not exactly in my comfort zone with Interspecies Reviewers. I usually avoid ecchi anime like the plague and this reads like the worst of the lot, but it’s precisely that honesty that intrigued me. Could it really be that shameless? Yes. Yes, it could. It is a damn crazy thing to watch, but also quite funny, and still fascinating in a “how weird can this really get?” kind of way. I’ve seen it described as “trash”, but it’s better than that. There’s love in the making of it, a deeply perverted love, but still.

Sex in anime, whatever next?!

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The breakout star of Dorohedoro has been Noi, the muscle-bound mountain of a woman, who has all of the imposing and threatening presence of Jason Voorhees, only to reveal that under her horrific Chatterer-like mask is a pretty face and flowing long hair. It’s the kind of disarming quality that I’ve grown to love about Dorohedoro, that a woman like Noi is capable of such blunt-force trauma in one moment, only to be seen wearing her hair up in a bun in completely normal office attire and going about her work in a civilised way the next. That she’s Shin’s uncertain kōhai is just the icing on the cake. Shin’s mask is a severed heart and his weapon of choice is a hammer: he’s a good senpai.

And the funny thing is, Noi is supposed to be a villain. Alongside Shin, Ebisu and Fujita, they are all out to kill Kaiman, our supposed main character, who’s also not exactly a pacifist: he’ll kill any sorcerer he can get his lizard mouth around, as poor Ebisu’s torn-off face will attest.

Yes, everyone is violent in Dorohedoro, and yes, everyone is too bloody likeable as well. It’s a story of anti-villains, likeable, funny, but just plain evil people, and it’s really refreshing. Too often, anime opts to lecture on morality, or to preach on peace and love, leading to predictable, oft-repeated choices, but Dorohedoro is in a world(s) of its own and has me feeling empathy for serial killers and monsters.

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Hodaka and Hina’s dilemma

Hina is a weather maiden, a person able to change the weather by sheer force of will, but it’s an ability that comes with a cost. Whilst her body’s gradually weakening with its every use, the rain won’t stop falling in Tokyo. The weather is messed up and the only way to fix it, Hina realises, is to sacrifice herself, such is the weather maiden’s sad fate. It has to be her life for everyone elses’.

The unspoken consequences of their choice

Hodaka and Hina are in love, but if Tokyo is to survive, Hina needs to die. That is the choice laid down by Makoto Shinkai: it’s Hina, or Tokyo.

At first, she takes control and allows herself to be spirited away and consumed by whatever it is that lives in the clouds. It stops raining, and not a minute too soon, because Tokyo is flooding and on the brink of total collapse.

Alas, Hodaka cannot give up on Hina. He flies in and brings her back. As you’d expect, it starts raining again. 3 years later, Tokyo is half-submerged in water, likely displacing 9 million people and sending Japan into meltdown.

Going the wrong way

It’s a shame Weathering With You never scrutinises Hodaka and Hina’s choice. In fact, the consequences of it are almost completely ignored in favour of their emotional reunion in the city they ruined.

In the 3 years since that day, did they ever really doubt themselves? Was it worth it? Because let’s be honest, whilst it delivers the romantic climax that Shinkai wanted, Hodaka and Hina have sacrificed an entire city for their love. In another story, they would be cast as villains.

It’s a selfish choice they make, understandable, but selfish, and it undercuts Weathering With You‘s end, if just because it never calls them on it.

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Who is the creator of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! mangaka is Sumito Ōwara, who, at the time of writing, seems quite young for a mangaka at just 26 years old. To put this into perspective, Ōwara would’ve been just 17 years old when (Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! anime director) Masaaki Yuasa was directing The Tatami Galaxy, and yet, just 10 years later, he’s now working with Yuasa. Ōwara isn’t just helping to oversee the anime adaption of his manga either, he’s credited with the ending’s key animation! This whole project must’ve been like a dream come true for him, not least of all because, if his writing is anything to go by, Ōwara loves anime and has always wanted to be an animator.

How is the art?

Sumito Ōwara’s art has a lively and loose feel (one may even say, easy breezy!). He isn’t concerned with drawing beautiful, delicate girls, rather, he’s emphasizing their frantic energy, burgeoning talent and playful sense of humour. Every page is packed with little touches. Right now there’s only five chapters of the manga (unofficially) translated into English, but I still needed a few hours to read them because there’s so much going on, be it Midori’s imagination crafting a spaceship out of nowhere or Sayaka’s determination to keep the other two grounded, there’s an enjoyable push and pull between the girls’ dreams and the harsh reality of making anime.

Is the anime faithful to the manga?

The anime isn’t 100% faithful, but then, what is? Nothing from the manga is notably missing in the anime, it’s more that Yuasa and co. are embellishing Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! by adding new scenes that only make it better. For example, in the first episode, we witness the moment that Midori fell in love with anime: sat on her sofa, eating junk food and watching Future Boy Conan (directed by a young Hayao Miyazaki, no less.) That was an anime original scene, and it’s a great example of how Yuasa’s sensibilities match Ōwara’s own. Indeed, before being offered the job of directing this anime, Masaaki Yuasa knew about it by reading what people were saying about him online (doing what is otherwise known as an “ego search”). Apparently a fan had suggested that Yuasa would be a good fit for an anime version of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and off he went. The rest is history.

Plot summary

Caiman is out to find the sorcerer that stole his memories and transformed his head into that of a reptile. I don’t know how to explain this in a coherent way but… there’s another man hiding in Caiman’s throat, a man that supposedly knows the identity of this illusive sorcerer, so, more often than not, Caiman catches a sorcerer, wraps his whole mouth around the poor person’s face and waits for the man in his throat to say if this person is “the one”. That makes sense, right?! I mean, that’s just the tip of iceberg…

Is it any good?

Dorohedoro is idiosyncratic. In other words, it’s really weird, to the point where there’s nothing else in anime that compares. It’s gory and full of grotesque monsters, but it’s also quite funny. Definitely more funny than scary. Everything is run-down, dirty and overcrowded, yet there’s life around every corner, happily crawling by. Q Hayashida has created a dismal, filthy world and populated it with a bunch of cheerful monsters. That’s really what comes across most of all in this first episode, that Dorohedoro is full of life. It’s a master-class in world building.

What are you worried about?

I was worried about Dorohedoro being a little too CG heavy, but aside from a few scenes, it’s well animated and really captures the dingy, lived-in aesthetic of Q Hayashida’s manga, not to mention the oddball chemistry between guys like Caiman and Nikaidō.

Is the storytelling coherent right now? Probably not at the moment, no. I wouldn’t blame anyone watching this feeling a little… bewildered. That’s certainly how I felt and I’ve collected a lot of Dorohedoro‘s manga, but have faith, dear reader, things are explained… eventually!

(Stream note: Dorohedoro is being streamed by Netflix in Japan, and therefore, as their “way”, it’s being held back for international release until they deign to release it. The version I watched was fansubbed. You may as well do the same.)

Plot summary

Volleyball!!

The talented Kageyama is called up to a national team training camp and Tsukishima is selected as one of the best first years in the prefecture, but where does that leave our noisy ginger pipsqueak Hinata?!

Is it any good?

Let me put my cards on the table: I think Haikyuu!! is one of the best sports anime ever. It’s always animated with love and care by Production IG, the soundtrack is a celebration of climbing your way to the top (composed by Run with the Wind‘s Yuki Hayashi) and the volleyball action is just awesome: the poetry of fighting to win, believing in your teammates and trying as hard as you can to be better, only to sometimes fall short. It has a real sweeping quality. This is the fourth season and from this first episode, I see no reason why things would be any different. It still feels like the same show to me. Haikyuu!! is just a great anime. Why not jump in already?

What are you worried about?

I started watching Haikyuu!! in 2014 and as with any long-running shonen anime, especially if, like me, you’re not following the manga, there comes a point where you have to ask yourself, “Do I still care?” Hinata may have grown a little taller, but for me, six years have passed and my memory’s a bit foggy. Can I still feel empathy for these characters? I really hope so, because I remember how much I used to like Haikyuu!!.

On that note, I see that the manga has begun its final arc, too. I’m glad. Stories need to end properly, and Haikyuu!! deserves a good one.

Plot summary

A man wakes up in a strange world, with all manner of weird things happening around him (like his arms and legs drifting away!). After a while, we learn that he’s a genius criminal detective “invading” the inner world of a violent serial killer called “The Perforator”. You see, in this story, a person’s “murderous intent” can be modelled into a virtual world and invaded like it’s a virtual reality game! Imagine something like Inception or Minority Report and you’ll be some ways to understanding the kind of story ID – Invaded wants to be.

Is it any good?

Well, yes and no. The first five minutes are awesomely weird, but then we’re pulled back into the real world and a bunch of talking heads explaining away all of that mystery and intrigue. ID – Invaded is that rare thing: an anime original project, and there’s a clear, visceral joy to the scenes set in the spectacular dream world, where gravity and logic are ignored and everything is jumbled up.

What are you worried about?

I’m not the biggest fan of police procedurals or indeed of any jargon-heavy anime. Case in point, I zoned out watching this and ended up having to go back and rewatch some exposition-heavy dialogue just to understand what the heck was going on with the weird dream Inception thing. Come to think of it, last season’s especially wordy Babylon anime also put me to sleep. I suppose what I’m trying to say, dear reader, is that I’m a lazy, lazy man and if an anime spends too long talking about “particles” or whatever, my mind’s likely to wander. Now, with all that exposition out of the way, I really hope ID – Invaded opts to show more than tell.

Plot summary

A boy is born with psychic powers. He grows up to be a gangster, brainwashing and manipulating low-lives into doing bad things, and then making them forget it ever happened.

Is it any good?

Pet is promising, but difficult to pin-down after just this one episode. Clearly, it’s a low budget affair, the kind of seinen horror anime that doesn’t aspire to be well-animated or popular (I’m thinking of stuff like Sci-Fi Harry and Blassreiter here) but is basically entertaining. Pulp anime is another way of putting it: melodramatic characters doing bad things to each other, which, I admit, doesn’t exactly sound like a good time, yet works in inventive ways.

There’s also an undercurrent of homoeroticm: men touching hands, open-shirted, getting into water fights and changing clothes together. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the author of Pet‘s manga, Ranjō Miyake, had written boys-love stories in the past, it just has that aesthetic.

(This is what it means to damn a series with faint praise, isn’t it?)

What are you worried about?

Pet walks a fine line between interesting and bland.

I have faith in director Takahiro Omori, at least. He has worked on a lot of good anime in the past and he surely wouldn’t knowingly walk into working on a dud manga. It’s just that this episode was neither convincing nor sympathetic. We still need a hook; something to make us care.

The images that I’ve chosen hopefully speak for themselves because Pet has some colourful and fun visuals when it dives into the crazy waters of the human mind, it just needs a personality to match.

I would also note that this was originally set to air during the Autumn 2019 season, but supposedly wasn’t ready and had to be delayed until now, hinting at problems behind the scenes. Which is to say, I hope the animation doesn’t collapse.

Plot summary

When youngster Midori falls in love with anime (haven’t we all?), her imagination starts firing like a machine-gun. A few years pass and she’s still as obsessed and only getting better at drawing. We learn that she wants to make her own anime and she’s now found couple of friends to share her passion for it. They geek out together and daydream funny ideas for a story.

Is it any good?

Heck yes. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (aka Hands off the Motion Picture Club!) is a love-letter to anime and, more broadly, to the boundless potential of animation, where the only limit is the led in your pencil and the depths of your mind. It is director Masaaki Yuasa at his earnest, free-wheeling best, taking a pen in hand and letting his imagination run wild. I had so much fun watching this, and I suspect that’s only half as much fun as I’m sure the animators at Science SARU must’ve had drawing it. I love that, for once, this isn’t a high-school anime drenched in melancholy and nostalgia. The girls seem like real, imperfect little brats, awkward and stick-like, living in the moment. They aren’t walking on eggshells, their voices are rough and passionate. Passion is the keyword here. Well, passion and love. Do what you love. Be creative.

What are you worried about?

Like pretty much every Masaaki Yuasa anime, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! won’t be for everyone. It is filled with rough and lively animation, crass jokes and silly banter. If you, like a lot of anime fans, prefer a more sedate pace with prettily drawn, cute characters, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! isn’t for you. I hope that Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! finds a fanbase, I fear that it will be small.

From manga to anime

In another post, we review what we can of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!‘s manga and learn a bit more about how its mangaka came to live out the dreams of his lively characters.

Plot summary

In a magical land, it’s Golem’s job to take care of the forest. One day, he stumbles across a human girl called Somali chained-up under one of his trees. Abandoned and completely helpless, it falls upon Golem to become her surrogate father and protect her from the weird and wonderful creatures that rule this strange place.

Is it any good?

Yes, it’s good!

Somali and Golem live in a candy-coloured wonderland where danger and magic are but a heartbeat away. It’s really imaginative and fun to watch. It’s also what I’d call “Dad-core”, in that large parts of this first episode are devoted to Golem learning how to be a good Dad to Somali! Imagine Bunny Drop set in Alice in Wonderland and you’ll be some way to understanding what it’s going for, which is a weird, yet refreshing combination of themes. I was relieved because, quite frankly, I’ve never been one for watching anime made for children, but this wasn’t that. Of course, it helps that the art is gorgeous too: if you couldn’t tell from the images above, the backgrounds in Somali and the Forest Spirit are a feast for the eyes.

What are you worried about?

Earnest stories like Somali and the Forest Spirit will always run the risk of becoming overly sentimental. I’m not demanding Made in Abyss levels of danger, I just hope there’s some subtlety and nuance to whatever conflicts lay ahead for Somali and Golem.

Finally, anime studios Satelight and “HORNETS” have set high standards with the vibrancy of this first episode. I really hope it isn’t downhill from here. For a show like this that’s built around adventure and magic, the visuals are vital. Let’s see if they can keep it up!

The lad covered in ash

It’s easy to assume that Vinland Saga is Thorfinn’s story alone, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Thorfinn’s life is just an echo of Askeladd’s own, a man willing to sacrifice anything to further his enigmatic ambitions. He is clever, charismatic and strong, but none of that matters, because he’s still a slave to his past: the little boy, covered in ash, trying to get back at the people that treated him and his mother like animals.

The Light of Dawn

Askeladd is a complicated person. Just like his comrade Bjorn, we are seduced by his charisma and intelligence. He feels different to the other Vikings, as if there’s some humanity or sympathy still alive in him, but there’s a hardness too. In episode 14 (“The Light of Dawn”), in the depths of winter, Askeladd’s Vikings stumble into a small, snowy village and kill most every man, woman and child. In the aftermath, in the white-blue moonlight, the lone survivor is a young woman stumbling through the snow. To Askeladd, she is nothing, just mere collateral. Who cares that they just butchered her whole family?

Thorfinn’s real fight

In the future, after I die, how do you plan to live your life, Thorfinn?

Askeladd dies in Thorfinn’s arms, urging him to look beyond the battlefield and become the “true warrior” that he could not, implicitly confirming that he admired Thors and knowingly wasted his life trying to escape his past, only to repeat it. In the end, the tragedy is that he couldn’t overcome his hatred. The ash won out.

The End of the Prologue

In a story filled with violence, Vinland Saga preaches pacifism, that to be a true warrior is to find some meaning in your life beyond hate, even if it means forgiving the man that killed your father.

In a historical sense, Vinland was what the Vikings called North America. To them, it’s an unexplored country, but on another level, it represents adventure and a land without hate, ending with Askeladd telling Thorfinn to move towards a future beyond the battlefield.

Second season?

The Vinland Saga anime adapted up to chapter 54 of the manga (at the time of writing, there are 168 chapters out) and whilst author Makoto Yukimura has said that the manga is reaching its final arc, it’s still likely to take him years to finish, suggesting that any future anime would be years in the making, too.

Which is to say, there hasn’t been an official announcement of a second season yet, but if the last few scenes of episode 24 are anything to go by, the animators are certainly hoping for it: many of the ending images are of characters from future chapters.

Alas, we can only hope! And you can bet I’ll be there if they ever get around to making it.

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Time has already come
The sun is gone – no more shadows
Can’t give up, I know, and this life goes on
I’ll be strong
I’ll be strong

Lyrics from Glassy Sky

Attack on Titan
(2013, Wit Studio, directed by Tetsurou Araki)

Sacrificing everything for a dream of a better life, only to burn up like a flare in the sky.

Flowers of Evil
(2013, ZEXCS, d. Hiroshi Nagahama)

A meteorite smashing through the rose-coloured nostalgia of anime high school into the emptiness that lays beneath.

From the New World
(2012, A-1 Pictures, d. Masashi Ishihama)

A sweeping epic set in a dystopia created by emotional repression. A world saved by empathy and curiosity.

Girls’ Last Tour
(2017, White Fox, d. Takaharu Ozaki)

The girls sight-see at the end of the world. Like a sad poem from a lost age.

MUSHI-SHI The Next Passage
(2014, Artland, d. Hiroshi Nagahama)

Kindles within me a dream that there’s some magic in the world still and, for that, it never fails to inspire me. The love of my anime life.

Ping Pong the Animation
(2014, Tatsunoko Production, d. by Masaaki Yuasa)

A demon, a dragon, a robot, all in need of salvation. The hero carries them to heaven. A story for both the person that believes in their friends, and for the friend stumbling under the weight of that belief.

Run with the Wind
(2018, Production I.G, d. by Kazuya Nomura)

Pour yourself into something and fight for it with everything you have. Leave nothing behind. Run for your life.

Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju
(2016, Studio DEEN, d. by Shinichi Omata)

What it means to live a life full of passion, pursuing creativity until the end, for all the love and sacrifice that brings.

Your Lie in April
(2014, ZEXCS, d. by Kyouhei Ishiguro)

For the people that carry music in their hearts.

On a similar note, in August, it was announced that Hiroshi Hamasaki is directing a new Blade of the Immortal anime for this year’s Autumn season. On this blog, that is big news, and the teaser confirms it: it’s a match made in heaven; the perfect material for a talented director too often saddled with ill fitting material versus a beautifully drawn, violent seinen manga that’s just aching for a faithful adaptation.

Fans can fight me on this, but I would suggest that Hiroshi Hamasaki hasn’t made a worthwhile anime since Steins;Gate, and even that didn’t reach the heights of Texhnolyze and Shigurui. Subdued and meditative, at their best Hamasaki’s series lull the viewer into a sleepy trance akin to a David Lynch film: a waking dream that’s only seconds from nightmarish horror and weird eroticism, only there’s less romanticism in Hamasaki. His anime aren’t happy. They are alienating and cold. In Texhnolyze, mankind has reached a dead-end and given up. It’s one of those rare science fiction stories that resists nostalgia and a happy ending. Who remembers the gel banana from Steins;Gate? Green, lumpy and dripping. Or that sense of hopelessness as Okarin jumps from timeline to timeline to save Makise, only to see her dying again and again. That’s Hamasaki to me, a guy capable of really memorable, cold anime.

Blade of the Immortal is a cold story. Like many a seinen manga before and after (Eden: It’s an endless world, I’m looking at you), it’s always felt a little too extreme for anime. I never bothered to watch the 2008 Bee Train version because I’ve only heard bad things (in the same way that I could never bring myself to watch the recent Berserk anime) but the manga is hard to ignore because it’s just so beautifully drawn and I ended up reading a lot of it a few years ago. Violent and beautiful, Hiroaki Samura’s story is set during the Tokugawa Shogunate period and swirls around Manji, an immortal swordsman cursed to kill a thousand evil men before he’s allowed to die, but what I remember most are the women: the peerless Makie, a swordswoman that inspires absolute awe and legend, and the headstrong Rin, a normal person that’s forced to contend with a world that has little sympathy for the weak.

Just like with Shigurui, there’s more than a hint of sadomasochism in Blade of the Immortal. It treads a fine line between what is violent and cruel and what is voyeuristic and erotic. Hiroaki Samura has a background in ero guro and it shows: there’s a lot of very focussed, beautifully-drawn torture and violence in Blade of the Immortal. It drags the reader into some very dark places that left me feeling a little dirty. To use modern parlance: Blade of the Immortal is problematic, but that’s fine. I don’t read manga or watch anime to feel clean and like everything’s okay. Quite frankly, I’d much rather be dragged through the mud by a story, and with a guy like Hamasaki at the helm, I wouldn’t expect any less.

There’s something really sad about Eren when he finally reaches the sea. For so much of this story, he’s been the driving force, a guiding light, but there is no end in sight for him now, no clear enemy to defeat, it’s just an unending road for him, robbed of its clarity.

“Eren will reach the sea for me!” – Armin

We could all use a friend like Armin. As Eren’s stood there, staring out across the sea, mourning his childhood and unable to let himself go, Armin’s clinging to a seashell, struggling to believe his eyes, smiling. All along, he was right. The world is full of strange and beautiful things. That’s why Levi chose to bring him back and not Erwin, because deep down, he knows that Armin imagines a place that extends beyond their cruel world. A true, free home. He sees more than just enemies. Erwin just wanted to reach Eren’s basement, but Armin wants to explore and see new things. In the heat of the moment, as he’s being literally roasted alive by Berthold and holding on for his dear life, his last thoughts aren’t full of anger and regret, they are reserved for his friend, Eren, and seeing the sea. He’s not the flashiest or the strongest, but he wrings every last second of his life out for his friend. In a series of emotional peaks as high as the Himalayas, Armin’s sacrifice is as high as Mount Everest. Combined with Hiroyuki Sawano’s moving soundtrack, I’ve watched it again and again, and felt my pulse race every time. It’s a story about self-sacrifice, dreams and companionship: the world can be a tough, hopeless place and sometimes it feels like there is no end to the struggle, but at the lowest point, all it takes is a smile, an outreached hand, a pat on the back.

When the Scouts finally reach the sea, it feels surreal, like they are standing at the edge of the known world, having have gone further than they ever dreamt possible. It’s euphoric before melting into melancholy, the beginning of the end. I love this story, these characters. I love how awestruck Mikasa looks as the waves rush in about her feet, how Levi refuses to let himself go, Eren’s sad speech and the song that plays behind it.

“But I was wrong. On the other side of the sea are enemies.” – Eren

Attack on Titan has always been a story about fighting complacency and refusing to accept a ceiling to a dream. Life is full of such moments, when there’s a choice to be made between merely existing or taking a risk, but risk is not always rewarded. Eren looks like a lost soul. He’s no longer the bright-eyed boy. There is no righteous path for him to follow, no correct way, yet he’s still carrying everyone’s expectations. Becoming an adult is learning to cope with others’ expectations of you. You put on a brave face, reassure them that it’s okay, but in a quiet moment, the doubt creeps in. “Was I right? Do I know what I’m doing?” After a while, the questions stop, because you’ve already gone too far. Eren has the look of a man that’s gone too far and can’t turn back. In such times, I rely on my friends to pull me back. Eren has Armin and Mikasa, and when it comes down to it, I’m certain they will save him, but it’s still hard to see them struggle so much. I’ve followed this story for so long at this point, I just want them to be happy, but that’s never been what Attack on Titan is about. Eren and Armin will die young. We know that for a fact now. They will leave Mikasa behind. It’s not fair at all, but to rise so high, to fight to change your life: I wouldn’t have this story any other way.

If anything, it’s more relevant now than ever!

A core theme is identity, because in Kaiba‘s world, it’s trivial to separate body and mind, therefore, what are you? What makes you what you are? Since you can switch bodies, your gender is fluid too: therefore, you are a distillation of your memories. In this story, Neiro loves Kaiba. Without realising it, she loves him in Chroniko’s female body as much as Warp’s male body. Their feelings transcend flesh and blood.

This is a transhuman society where people can live endless lives through countless bodies, so, what’s the problem? Well, it’s still a human society, where the powerful exploit the weak, a person’s body can be sold on the black market and have their consciousness locked inside a long since forgotten memory stick.

In Kaiba, almost everything is disposable. Chroniko’s memories are discarded in such a nonchalant way: removed by a crooked doctor, her memories join millions of others floating in orbit around her planet, her unfulfilled dreams glowing like fireflies in the endless dark of space, indistinguishable from millions of others. It’s just the insignificant manner in which her whole life is just thoughtlessly discarded that destroys me. It’s as nihilistic as anime can be.

Kaiba is what happens when our ability to wield technology outpaces the evolution of our empathy. Our memories are intimate and make us what we are, but there’s something deeply unsettling about seeing them as quantifiable as files on a hard drive, easily modified, copied or simply forgotten. They suddenly feel disposable. It’s dehumanising.

Kaiba is not perfect. It’s rushed towards the end as a resolution is sought, and some episodes aren’t as coherent as others, but it’s easy to forgive an anime series that’s still so unique. Even after 11 years, it’s a refreshing example of what anime can be: nothing looks like Kaiba, it has such a unique aesthetic that separates it from the time in which it was made and, combined with what it’s trying to say, imbues it with a timeless quality.

Do I have the discipline to <schedule my posts ahead of time>? I’ve no idea! It should be an interesting experiment though… — me, in April

Well, I have the answer now: no, I do not have the discipline! For a little while, I tried, but nothing really sparked. From the moment that I stepped off the treadmill, I just stopped thinking about anime altogether. I guess I just needed the rest. Anyway, my little Spring hiatus gave me a chance to think about how I’m approaching anime and this blog.

For a while now, I’ve pursued mostly new anime and followed along with the zeitgeist. Even if I offset myself by a season or two, I’ll continuously look for something new, something that I haven’t seen before. At the same time, I wanted to rekindle an old idea of mine: Weird Anime, where I’d write and collect 100 word reviews of, you guessed it, weird and obscure anime. The problem that I faced is that I couldn’t remember what some of my favourite weird anime were about because I hadn’t seen them for years and years.

This is the plight of what it means to be an avid follower of visual media in today’s age: there’s always something new and shiny to be excited about, a new season of anime to talk about, and it all moves so fast. I fall into this trap as much as anyone. As soon as I’ve finished an anime series, no matter how meaningful it was to me, it’s strictly consigned to the past and starts gathering dust in the parts of my mind marked ‘Okay to delete’.

Thinking about that now, it seems so silly that I’m essentially overwriting stories that mean something to me with whatever’s hot in a given season. Weird Anime was the trigger for this, but I realised that if I wanted to write about this stuff again, I’d need to rewatch them. Straight away, I went and started rewatching Kaiba (2008) and Kaiji (2007): how could I forget the intricacies of E-Card, or how Kaiji loses an ear, but forget them I did.

I followed up Kaiji with Gankutsuou and, bloody hell guys, Gankutsuou is totally amazing. Like, who the hell goes and just animates something that looks as unique as Gankutsuou any more? Where did it come from? Looking at it now, it’s a masterpiece, but rarely do I see it brought up in anime discourse. Everyone still talks about Evangelion, but who the fuck is talking about Gankutsuou?

I guess I’m at the end of this post now. If I’m going to impress anything on you, it’s to go look at your anime list, look at what you loved 10 years ago, and just watch it again. You needn’t to worry, because you know it’s good. You know it gets under your skin. Let it. It can still move you.

A particularly busy April has forced my hand, but this is probably the right move for me anyway: I’ll be attempting to schedule my posts ahead of time, which is to say, whilst I’m beavering away in the background building up the schedule, this blog will fall silent for a month or two.

I came to this decision whilst reflecting on a few things. I want to write better, longer lasting pieces on anime. In order to do this, I’ll need to separate myself from what’s currently-airing right now and take the time to think ahead. I really believe that posting regularly is important for a blog to grow, but I also need the time to ruminate more on what I want to say. Do I have the discipline to work like this? I’ve no idea! It should be an interesting experiment though.

As ever, thanks for reading! I’ll be stepping into my time machine now, see you soon!

One thing is for sure, if you’re going to watch it, please go in as spoiler-free as possible. There’s no doubt in my mind that knowing where it’s all headed undercuts the suspense that ends every episode like a guillotine. Every tiny advantage that the children gain is eclipsed by an even larger setback, until it all collides in a stunning finale that’s full of invention and emotion.

I need more already.

It wasn’t all plain sailing either: Sister Krone was a weird sideshow that the anime failed to humanise, and if her climatic moment was fluffed, how would the rest of the anime fare?

I needn’t have worried. They nailed it. Most of all, they nailed the friendship of Emma, Ray and Norman. Shonen anime have a habit of undercutting the vulnerability of their heroes by bestowing them with an invincible power that they need only master, but none of Emma, Ray or Norman were like that. Right up until the end, they felt vulnerable. A vulnerability best emphasised as we trace Isabella’s own past and her relationship with a younger boy that’s a lot like Norman. He plays guitar ever so beautifully, but ends up monster food like the rest. There’s a sad inevitability to it all. As Isabella stands on the wall that marks the boundary of her world, she stands alone, and a single person can only go so far. Emma stands with Ray and Norman and is infinitely stronger within herself.

The Promised Neverland should be the next breakout hit: it should be on Netflix. Whether or not that ends up being the case is clearly beyond my control, but it seems so obvious that this is both good enough and addictive enough to hook in a million people in a matter of days. It needs an audience bigger than what Crunchyroll is capable of providing. Crunchyroll reaches anime fans, which is fine, but The Promised Neverland should be reaching fans of good TV full stop.

Most of all, it rewards patience: it’s a non-linear series, constantly recontextualising scenes from another perspective as seemingly random side characters suddenly take focus. Slowly but surely, things start to make sense, yet it still leaves us with questions that may never be answered. Where is Boogiepop from? By whom was Echoes sent to Earth in order to judge humanity? How is a Synthetic Human made?

That enigmatic quality is a large part of Boogiepop’s charm. The Boogiepop at Dawn story arc begins with Boogiepop and Echoes meeting in a strange place: the sky is red and there is rubble everywhere. Could they be wandering through a post-apocalyptic Earth millions of years into the future? We never find out and it’s probably for the best that we don’t: the truth is never as interesting as what we might imagine.

From an anime production point of view, the series doesn’t quite hit the heights I was hoping for. Shingo Natsume and his team are of proven quality: from Space Dandy and One Punch Man to ACCA 13, these are memorable anime with a spark that’s sorely lacking in Boogiepop and Others. It isn’t badly animated or anything, it just looks generic and tired, which only exacerbates how difficult it is follow when every character is so deadpan.

This is total speculation on my part, but I can’t help but think that the controversy sparked over (light novel artist) Kouji Ogata’s distaste for the anime’s designs affected director Natsume and his team’s enthusiasm for the project. Imagine being hard at work on a project you hope people will love, only to be publicly criticised for what amounts to a creative difference? It would be hard not to lose heart, and it’s also notable that the anime’s brilliant trailer has action scenes that never appeared in the series itself.

Even still, there are moments when Boogiepop springs into life: there’s a particularly evocative scene in the last episode that sees a character falling from a great height, I only wish that the whole anime was as cinematic. However, I’ve no complaints about the soundtrack, Kensuke Ushio’s work is as wonderful as ever: he swept me away into another world and largely saved the series for me.

And that’s my take on Boogiepop and Others. It’s a perfectly fine anime that had the potential to be great. If nothing else, listen to the soundtrack!

At this point, I have to say I think this anime is as good an adaptation as fans of The Promised Neverland could have hoped for. It’s the best kind of escapism: I lost myself watching this episode, it flew by so fast, and I can hardly stomach that there’s now only one more left.

And yet, for such a breathless episode, it’s surprising to think that pretty much the whole of the first half was spent in a single room with Ray and Emma.

Ray decided that he’d burn down the house (and himself with it) in order to create enough of a diversion that the others could escape. He douses himself in lighter fluid and lights a match: notice the way that the flame is reflected in Ray’s eye, these fleeting touches of beauty are what keep me coming back to anime time and again, and you can really sense his anger and determination to go through with it. Emma’s having none of that though. She catches the flame in mid-air: she has another plan.

Later on, at the edge of the forest, Ray has this bemused look about him, as if he’s suddenly seeing Emma for the first time. Until now, I don’t think he’s ever felt like he could rely on another person, yet now he’s huddled there with all of the others, he’s not only realising just how strong she is, but also that he can trust her.

Emma’s strength is her empathy. She trusts in others when Norman and Ray won’t. She may seem carefree, but there’s a sense of empathy, and therefore responsibility, about her that marks her out as the leader amongst them.

Ray’s plan was to kill himself because he couldn’t fathom another way out, but his perspective was flawed because he refused to ask for help. Emma has the answer because she fundamentally believes in her family and friends. You cannot save the world on your own.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Of the five anime I’ve picked, this is the one I’m most iffy about. Even after reading some of the manga, I can’t quite get a handle on Shonen Jump’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. What I wanted from this is another Claymore or Dororo: a dark trek through a heartless landscape; a journey dotted with tragedy and heartbreak, but then there’s a lot of comedy in the trailer, which feels weird and doesn’t fit with Ufotable’s moody atmosphere. The demons are also a bit disappointing: more vampires than actual monsters. We’ll just have to see. Mainly this is here because I’m a sucker for the aesthetic of the late Meiji & early Taisho period and the manga’s cover art is lovely.

Fairy gone

Fairy gone is one of the few of new anime this season with adults as the main characters! Combine that with P.A. Works’ reliable production quality and there’s already reason to be intrigued. Written by Ao Jūmonji, the author of Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, and directed by Kenichi Suzuki, the director of the first three JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure anime, there’s a reliable core of anime creators working on Fairy gone. The premise is fairly typical: during a war, people have “fairies” transplanted into them from animals, granting them special abilities to fight. What’s more interesting is that this is a post-war drama: years later, there’s still soldiers running around with those weird abilities.

Sarazanmai

It’s a Kunihiko (Utena) Ikuhara anime. As ever with this guy, expect something surreal and emotional. The trailer and promotional art gives off a tsuritama/Eccentric Family vibe which is no bad thing: there’s a kappa running amok in Japan stealing peoples’ “shirikodama”, a “mythical organ” pulled from of a person’s anus that transforms them into a kappa! I said it was weird, right?! Sarazanmai is about pulling the shirikodama from zombies… This could be really, really gross.

Mix

https://youtu.be/Y2309oA65e8

With Run with the Wind finishing, I’ll need a new sports anime to spill my guts over and what better than a new Mitsuru Adachi baseball anime?! And a multi-generational sequel to Touch at that! The last Adachi anime I saw was 2009’s Cross Game and that was excellent. He’s 68 years old now but I doubt he’s lost any of his charm.

Fingers crossed the anime production can hold up: none of the staff involved strike me as particularly good: from the director (Toshinori Watanabe) to series composition (Atsuhiro Tomioka), there’s hardly a good anime between them, but I have faith that Adachi’s quality will shine through. Be prepared for a slow-burning, down-to-Earth sports drama: the sound of crickets in the depths of a long, hot summer as another group of boys dream of carrying their school to the Koshien.

Carole & Tuesday

Whenever Shinichiro Watanabe’s involved in an anime series, there’s reason to feel excited, but then I saw the trailer for Carole & Tuesday and my expectations went through the roof. Animation-wise, it’s already looking like a reliably high-level Bones production, but what’s most promising is the clear rapport between the girls: the scene of them jamming together is full of tiny details, like the intricate finger work on Tuesday’s guitar. This looks like an anime that’s celebrating music and a story about doing what you love. The last anime I saw like this was Your Lie in April and if Carole & Tuesday is anywhere near as good, we’re onto a winner.

It’s hard to deny that life in Dororo is miserable. In episode 9, I watched a women die of starvation. It’s that type of anime. I hate to reference a term as loaded as “grimdark”, but suffice to say, it’s not series that sugarcoats anything.

Japan’s Sengoku period seems like it was a miserable time to live, especially for the poor. The samurai aren’t so much the romantic heroes of yore as ravening packs of arrogant men out to maim or kill as if to allay their boredom.

There is beauty in Dororo too, but even that has a melancholy feeling. Dororo’s mother dies in a field of beautiful, deep red flowers. Red for all of the blood that’s soaked into the ground. Dororo cannot look at them without remembering her.

Trust & Betrayal is the story of Kenshin’s enigmatic cross-shaped scar, the mark left by two star-crossed lovers: one line for each of their lives. Just like in Dororo, Kenshin’s life is torn asunder by larger societal shifts, in this case, the end of the Edo period. He fights for what he sees as the underprivileged, but he’s still killing people at the behest of others.

Both of these anime are about individuals trying to survive in a country that’s riven by conflict, their destinies irrevocably changed by events outside of their control. In another time, Kenshin and Hyakkimaru could be happy, but that is not their fate. Neither anime paint a romantic picture of Japan’s past, quite the opposite in fact, they depict a terrifying country to live in. People scream in pain and run for their lives as they are cut down by blades and left for carrion by the sides of the road.

There is a stunning physicality to the action scenes: grounded in realism, swords cut through flesh and bone, and fights are decided in a matter of seconds. In every moment, lives are on the line.

Indeed, these anime are grim, but that’s not to say hopeless. We are all subject to the broad political currents of our times, but that does not mean that we, as individuals, have no control. A key theme that links both Dororo and Trust & Betrayal is that push and pull between the individual and the country, morality and progress.

It’s very literal in Hyakkimaru’s case, because for every part of his body that he regains, his country is plunged ever deeper into strife: his very existence is antithetical to his country’s health, but surely he deserves a fair chance at life? For Kenshin, that he’s only murdering people for the greater good is muddled by the collateral damage that’s left in his wake. Some of the people that he kills were just trying to carve out a normal life, and who is he to take that away from them? Even if it’s for what he sees as the greater good?

There is no clear path: not for Hyakkimaru, nor for Kenshin. Life is not clear and bad things can happen. It’s often grim, which just emphasises how ephemeral happiness can be. It takes a strong-minded person to live in such times, but from that strength is born a warmth and optimism that offsets all of the grimness and cruelty. If they can dream, why can’t we?

Krone wasn’t exactly a sympathetic character, but even still, her death was hard to watch.

She had such a strong will to live that it spilt over into foolhardy ambition, but to see it all stripped away from her was cruel.

Her death is intercut with scenes of the children eating breakfast. Just as she’s reduced to being like a scared animal caught by a hungry predator, I wondered if this isn’t how weaker animals see us as we shovel meat into our mouths? It’s a subtle reminder: we have no moral high ground here. I felt slightly sick watching it all play out.

With Krone’s death, we’re officially past the point that I’d read up to in the manga and suffice to say, I didn’t expect everything to go to shit so fast.

What a crazy episode.

Everything is reset by Isabella, including Emma’s leg.

Her knee being snapped like a twig was like something out of Made in Abyss.

Firstly, it’s really fucking visceral and Emma’s clearly in tremendous pain, but more to the point, we’re reminded that these are still just children after all, and an adult just snapped a child’s leg. It’s a massive wake up call.

I go back and forth with Isabella (Mama). Part of me thinks that The Promised Neverland is her slyly preparing her children for the harsh life beyond the walls and that she’s making herself into a villain to teach them a tough lesson about strength and complacency, but if it’s all an act, it’s a very good one. There’s no sympathy in her eyes, no pity: only superiority.

Where it all goes from here is anyone’s guess.

Phil’s going to be involved, though. He just has to be.

The Great Passage is a rare thing in anime: it’s about adulthood.

We get jobs, meet our co-workers and from then on, spend day after day with them. As the weeks, months and years pass us by, you get used to being with your colleagues to a point where they become an almost extended family, until someone suddenly leaves and you’re reminded that this is “just a job” after all, but it’s hard not to feel some sense of loss anyway, especially if you’re doing what you love.

Half way through The Great Passage, Majime’s friend Nishioka moves on from the dictionary’s staff. Together they were supposed to be the future, but it’s now just Majime, and before he knows it, thirteen years have passed and he’s the driving force behind the whole thing.

One of the toughest questions we all have to ask ourselves is:

“What am I supposed to do with my life?”

Time is precious. You can blink and thirteen years pass. The older I get, the more I feel it. A good job can be like a light inside the darkness. Having that sense of purpose is important, but there’s a deeper truth still, because even after his thirteen years of hard work, Majime is still having those nightmares about being lost. I suppose that sense of restlessness just never goes away.

Just as he admits that his dictionary will “forever be incomplete”, there is no answer to my question, because there is no certainty: we are all lost trying to find a way through the darkness. It will never feel like we’ve made it to the other side. Coming to terms with that is a large part of what The Great Passage is about. It’s an adaptation of a novel by Shion Miura, who also wrote Run with the Wind. It’s a sad fact that out of everything I’ve published since November, my two posts about Run with the Wind have gotten the least most views. Miura doesn’t write stories that are popular with anime fans, but then again, most anime fans aren’t old enough to appreciate what she’s trying to say anyway. I need a voice like hers though, a voice that’s speaking directly to me right now.