All I know about it is that the OP fukkin slaps.
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@panfriedmarmot is very correct; the TV cut of that song is fantastic.
The Show is also fantastic, although the ending to the show is strongly ‘eh’. I remember hearing that the ending was anime original, but I can’t cite that off the top of my head.
TL;DR ending aside, watch this show
Yeah it suffers manga adaptation ending syndrome probably, since the manga is ongoing.
They are making a 2nd season of Kaguya sama, btw.
Thinking about getting a cinema buff an anime film for Hanukkah. I’m not too well versed in his taste cause I haven’t seen most of the movies he talks about, but he seems to be into dark comedies and intense dramas. I was thinking Millennium Actress might be a good gift for him but I’m curious if any of you have opinions for alternatives.
Yeah, sounds like you definitely can’t go wrong with any Satoshi Kon.
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Apparently there’s a bunch of Shokugeki we hadn’t watched (second half of season 3 and a chunk of season 4) so we’re back to watching naked people have foodgasms and it’s somehow only getting more ridiculous. I feel like this is an unsustainable rate of escalation, but we’ll see.
Demon Slayer was neat but I had to adjust my expectations after the first couple of episodes. It tricked me by setting up something that seemed more like a realistic take on mythology, and then it turned into Naruto but better. Very enjoyable, not very deep. The boar dude is naturally the best character.
Still need more JoJo.
Did you watch Yakitate Japan!? There is no such thing as an unsustainable rate of escalation WRT foodgasms. Until eating the food literally lets you go back 20 years into the past and rewrite history there is no height too high!
Finally will get to see Promare tomorrow evening.
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Well. Promare is an eyefull.
Blink and you’ll miss it.
The audience applauded at a few key moments.
I would describe it as an anime cocktail.
Definitely a must see.
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That’s my go-to gift for anyone who likes cinema but isn’t familiar with anime.
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Intense dark or intense emotional? Your Name would tilt a little toward column b.
I haven’t actually seen it, but A Silent Voice might work.
I hereby admit to having watched all of Keijo!!!. I only did so after hearing it talked about by some people I trust as admittedly bad show, but bad in a good way. This is of course the infamous boob-and-butt-battle anime which pits cute girls against each other. They are fighting on a platform in a pool, lose if they fall into the pool or to the ground, are are only allowed to hit each other using their asses and tits.
The show is of course primarily a vehicle for fanservice and classic otaku-pseudo-harem bait with a large number of various stereotypes for female characters. However, this show is actually kind of worth watching in the same way you’d watch Prison School or an exploitation film. The joke about the show is that it takes all the tropes of sports and battle anime and plays them straight in a(n even more) ridiculous situation. Particularly hilarious are the special attacks, like a character “winding up” her boobs by twisting her nipples, then performing a drill attack. I regularly laughed my ass off at the hilariously stupid shit the writers came up for this thing.
It’s a bad show, but a good kind of bad. A bad you can just turn your brain off to and laugh at how intentionally ridiculous it is.
P.S.: I find it weird that the forum software automatically contracts any larger amout of exclamation marks to three.
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Got the blu ray release of Utena for Christmas. There’s nothing I can say about the show that people here don’t already know, but this release is SO good. The remastering of the animation really shows and the quality is leaps and bounds above the DVD release in 2011 or the fansubs I watched shortly before that release. Any die hard Utena fan (and I know there’s a few of those on here) needs this.
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Just finished the first season of Dr. Stone with the second season forthcoming. I’ve also been reading the manga off-and-on again through fansubs and the recent german release, but considering that is only on volume 3 so far it is actually lagging behind the anime at the moment. For the the two people living under a rock (he he), Dr. Stone is about a high school science prodigy named Senku who is caught in a global catastrophe that leaves all of humanity literally petrified. 3,700 years later he is revived in a world that has returned to essentially the stone age.
He manages to find a way to undo the petrification, saving a couple of his friends but also is forced depetrify a cunning brute named Tsukasa. The two are in disagreement how to build a new society, Senku wanting to save all of humanity by speed-running societal progress, while Tsukasa wants to rid society of old norms and revive only the young, even if it means forsaking technology for that. A violent confrontation ensues which leaves Senku for dead, only to survive and find a village of other humans in exile and start his tech tree from there.
The series is about technology overcoming dangers and humanities own shortcomings. Initially the show actually positions Senku’s classmate Taiju as the main character, the typical “strong but stupid” shonen manga protagonist popular in Shonen Jump this series is published in, but quickly abandons that setup in favor of the much more interesting Senku. It also can’t be denied that Senku both in character and appearance resembles Hiruma from the criminally underrated Eyeshield 21, which is from the pen of the same writer, Riichiro Inagaki. While this plays into the stereotype of the a/immoral scientist, like with Hiruma you can see throughout the series that both characters also strongly value their friendships and their goals. While the series has a pretty good progressions and does a great job working in various inventions and technological advances in very entertaining manner, you can also see a couple of plotholes creep up, particularly pertaining to the backstory of the village Senku comes in contact with.
The other side of the equation is of course the artwork. Inagaki’s partner on Eyeshield 21 was Yusuke Murata who went on to become the artist for the rework of One Punch Man. For Dr. Stone he is teaming up with Korean artist Boichi, known previously for Sun-Ken Rock. Unfortunately I have to say that this is a big step backwards. Boichi is a technically good artist, but I just can’t like his character designs, at least for female characters. Almost all of them are extremely uncanny to me, as in the valley of the same name. They seem dolllike and are most often given some “kissy-mouths” in an unnecessary attempt to increase their sex-appeal.
As for the anime adaptation, it sticks so far very closely with the manga and adds some very good backgrounds and coloration to the whole thing. The sound is also very well done with very good voice acting. A very big plot point also revolves around music. The song that was chosen also works pretty well for its purposes, but you can tell they only got one of it. It’s not annoying in it being repeated too often, but you can tell. I’d say for now watching the anime is the better option for those superior technolgies (he he), if you don’t care to stay up to date with the manga itself.
Not trying to make this something daily or anything, but I am both on vacation and sick so I’ve been watching quite a bit of anime recently. I also know that I can’t really get around the elephant in the room here regarding this show being produced by Kyoto Animation, so let me just say that this just emphasizes what an absolute tragedy both in terms of human life itself and artistically the attack on their studio was.
I just finished the first seasons of Sound! Euphonium and while I contemplated watching the second season and movies first, but I had to get this out now.
The show kind of passed me by when it first came out, as it was a period when I didn’t watch a lot of anime. I heard it was a good show but going into it I knew two things about it: 1) it was adapted by Kyoto Animation, who are one of if not the best anime studios of the last decade; and 2) that it was about a high school band with a bunch of cute girls. As KyoAni kind of popularized the “Cute girls doing cute things in a club” genre I mistook it for a new sort of K-On! before actually watching it. Oh, how wrong I was.
This show is so good. If there is a good comparison I would say this is more like a sports show, specifically the show that was in my mind was Ace of the Diamond with the parallels of having to struggle for your position within the “team” and improving your own skills to help your entire group succeed. Yes, this show is not about cute girls being cute in a band (though the characters are definitely easy to look at), but about struggle, self-doubt, self-improvement, empathy and teamwork as you follow a full-on wind ensemble of more than 30 students around. And this show has so many humanizing and empathic (is that the right adjective?) moments within it. These characters feel so real and its beautiful.
It is also very interesting how the show gradually shifts its cast around, having different characters be important and different points of the show while others fade a bit into the background or moved from the background to the foreground. With the size of the ensemble it is of course impossible to have all the characters fleshed out, but even in the minor players you can observe small changes. Though not exactly completely a background character, my favorite here is Natsuki, who only plays an ancillary role to the show but actually has a fully realized arc herself.
KyoAni also did an excellent job in the colorization, backgrounds and voice direction here that emphasizes the elements that makes the show great. Of course, a big part here plays the music as well. Though I did also make my way through the entirety of Nodame Cantabile, I am still woefully ill-equipped to judge this. I will have to rely on Petimort’s judgement he posted about three years ago that they are doing an excellent job. To my ears it sounds great but I am not able to pick up on those nuances he describes. However, even a musical warthog like myself was able to tell that while one of the prospective trumpet soloists was very good, the other one was clearly better, which is credit to the team that took care of that at KyoAni as well.
Again, this show is so good. I am definitely continuing watching the second season and possibly the films. First on the chopping block is the OVA episode.
To follow up on my Sound! Euphonium post, someone on reddit pointed me to this video (which I am not embedding because the title itself is also a spoiler) with an analysis on the Trumpet soloists auditions. The text overlaid is unfortunately a bit fast so you’ll have to pause, and while I don’t understand the meaning of some of the terms used, it did help me grasp a bit more of the technically nuances and differences between the two performances that are showcased.
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I spend the last couple of days finishing off what remained of Sound! Euphonium. The second season is just as high quality as the first and possibly even better based on the stories it covers, completing the school year that started in the first. I took a short look at the first two movies, only to see if they were indeed just re-tellings of the TV series, which they were. I saw bits and pieces of new animation, but didn’t bother actually watching them as I had just seen the larger experience.
Instead today I watched the new movie that came out last year, Liz and the Blue Bird (Liz to Aoi Tori) and I kind of wish I didn’t? That is not a judgement of the quality of the film. It is in fact excellent and very touching indeed. My issue is that the story feels a bit of a retread at first, dealing with two characters who are also a central focus of the first arc of the second season. However, the movie is set in the school year after the TV series (which isn’t obvious at first), and those characters, who are now in their final year of high school, have to deal with their impending graduation and possibly being separated again, which prompts a deeper examination of their friendship. Because of this I think I would have done better not to never watch this film, but give myself a bit of a bigger distance between seeing the TV series and the film, as would have been for people between seeing the series when it aired (2015 and 2016) and the film in theaters (2018).
The film also features a slightly different art direction and character designs, which it uses to draw a bigger contrast between the main narrative of the orchestra and the fantasy segments of the titular meta-story of “Liz and the Blue Bird”, of which a musical piece representing that fictional narrative the ensemble is rehearsing. Those fantasy segments had at least to me a distinctly Ghibli-esque feel to me as well.
Finally, I’d make a mistake if I forgot again to mention the strong yuri vibes that permeate the whole series, and particularly this movie. This is of course not a bad thing, I just think it deserves more recognition than I showed it initially. I also think it further gives credence to the analogy with sports series I made before, as in those shows the male bonding is also regularly interpreted as grounds for romantic relationships (at least by yaoi fangirls), as can the bonds between female bandmates here, though as said, I think far more explicitly in this film.
I’m weak and started rewatching Eureka Seven, one of my comfort food anime.