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Julia's Reviews on Various Media

Thank God I'm done with this show! Now to completely eviscerate it!

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Rating: 55/100.

Dear lord, you have no idea how much I wanted to like this show. I really wanted to like this. I really did. More so than Demon Slayer, even. When Crunchyroll decided they wanted to try their hand at producing their own anime, a lot of people had mixed emotions, excitement and trepidation. Unfortunately, the latter wound up being more justified, as the majority of Crunchyroll's self-produced anime usually wound up being either mediocre (Tower of God and God of High School) or outright bad (Gibiate and Ex-Arm). The only one I was even remotely looking forward to was Fena: Pirate Princess, which promised to be a rip-roaring adventure series in the vein of stuff like Future Boy Conan and Mysterious Cities of Gold. So you'd think after the disasters that were their previous shows, that Crunchyroll would finally step up and make something that would actually be genuinely good, right? Well...at first, Fena seemed like it would go that way, but...it crashed and burned at the end. Not nearly as bad as, say, Wonder Egg Priority, but seriously, Fena: Pirate Princess as a whole is a massive disappointment on every level.

As a young girl, Fena Houtman was forced to watch as her family was slaughtered before her eyes. A friend of hers, Yukimaru, only managed to save her by sending her out to sea before her family's killers could pursue her. She winds up on an island called Shangri-La, and is forced to live in a brothel. The only thing she really remembers is her father's message: "Go to Eden." Years later, she's still there, and is considered at the age where she is expected to partake in sex work against her will. When an attempt to escape goes awry, a band of pirates manages to take her away from Shangri-La, Yukimaru being one of them. But her father's final message is still a mystery to her, and she and the pirates decide to try and find Eden in order to piece together Fena's lost memories and unlock the many secrets surrounding her life.

I wanted to be much more generous, especially with my rating for it, but the more I watched it and got closer to the finale, the more I began to realize that Fena, as a show, has really stupid writing. For one, it always seems to jump from one plot point to another without really bothering to either flesh them out or follow up on it. Fena's older retainers are taken hostage? Don't pay attention to them, we've got to find out who commissioned Fena's crystal! We find out who made the crystal? Oh, pish posh! We've got to find the coordinates for El Dorado! Wait, what's El Dorado? Who gives a shit! We need to have Fena be kidnapped by a group of female pirates and their crazy boss! A character's been sent to go after our group because they went against their main mission? Nope, we don't give a shit! Yukimaru needs to save Fena! What's this thing you call character development? You need to care that these characters are going from place to place even though they're being given no time to show what they're like outside of trying to save the world! Do you see what the problem is here? With the show being only 12 episodes long, it's given literally no time to really flesh out all the ideas it has or even follow up on them. It's like ten different writers are being called to write the script, but they can't seem to decide which ideas they want to focus on, so they just throw them all into a blender without considering if the end result will even work or not. As a result, the characters only act based on what's convenient to advance the plot and make really bizarre leaps in logic. Add to that, the story is just full of underutilized ideas, Deus Ex Machinas, and inconsequential philosophical bullcrap that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is a pretty clear case of too many cooks spoiling the soup.

As a result of this show's messy writing decisions, none of the characters are really all that interesting. The show tries to make us care for the band of pirates that Fena joins up with, but they're all so one-note and cliche that they feel more like props to move the story forward than three-dimensional people. We're never shown what their lives are like outside of the adventure they're on, save for a few short flashbacks that don't really do much of anything, and instead, the show makes the case that we, the audience, should care about them just because it says so, rather than, y'know, making the effort to make its own case for why we should. If you're going to make a rip-roaring adventure show, caring about the characters and their plight should be paramount, right?! Speaking of characters I can't bring myself to give a shit about, Yukimaru. Honestly, I never liked this guy. He always came off to me like an overly angsty emo edgelord who acts needlessly dickish towards Fena because the writers think it'll demean his masculinity if he doesn't. I honestly could not believe that this guy could ever have any friendly feelings towards Fena because of the way he treats her when he first appears. For one, he legitimately calls Fena a coward because she can't remember how to get to Eden, implying that she is somehow a bad person for her memories being blocked due to the trauma she experienced, even though there is absolutely nothing that says Fena did it out of malicious intent. The fuck?! Secondly, when Fena tries to learn how to use a weapon in order to help the pirates, Yukimaru shoots her down because he thinks she'll only cause trouble and says that she should just sit and do nothing. We're seriously supposed to like this guy?! Granted, the show seems to have realized how bad his first impression came across and tried to tone down his jackass behavior in the second half, thank God, but it still did nothing to really make me care about him as a person. Out of all the characters who never seemed to get any development at all, Tsubaki and the band of antagonistic female pirates are the more egregious examples, as we learn nothing about Tsubaki other than that he's often exasperated by everyone's antics, and...literally absolutely nothing about the female pirates. They just pursue the main group, kidnap Fena, with one lady being unnecessarily jealous of Fena for reasons that are literally out of her control, and getting killed when their ship gets hit with a cannon...and just randomly coming back to life in the final episode with literally no explanation for how they even survived. WHAT?! Hello, show?! You cannot have your characters go through a situation that is guaranteed to kill them, and then just randomly bring them back to life with zero explanation whatsoever!!

Personally though, Fena herself, the main character, is yet another victim of the show's bad writing decisions. At first, it seemed like she was going to be a plucky girl who'd join up with the pirates and learn to be more self-sufficient, kind of like Yona from Yona of the Dawn, or Shirayuki from Snow White With the Red Hair. After all, who doesn't like watching a character grow from being weak and helpless to stronger and more proactive, even if she decides to learn fighting skills or more practical skills like medicine or strategy? But here's the thing: Fena is never allowed to do anything on her own throughout the entire show. All she ever does is get kidnapped or have the plot explained to her, and the show seems to go out of its way to make sure Fena herself is never allowed any agency or autonomy. That time she led the pirates into the cave where the coordinates to El Dorado/Eden were? Fena didn't find out on her own, it's because a magic voice told her where to go to find it! And Fena never actively seeks answers out on her own. It's either always in her repressed memories, or someone else just hands them to her, and she always gets dragged around by the other characters, so she's literally little more than a prop. To me, it just felt like Fena was just there to be a macguffin damsel in distress, which is really sad, because she actually does have a personality and a lot of potential as a character that goes completely unutilized! If the show wanted to, they didn't have to necessarily make her some action girl who kicks ass and takes names by killing people. She could have just as easily become their captain or maybe become a tactician and led the pirates through her own efforts. Instead, she's just pushed around and only made to act whenever the story calls for it, and...if you ask me, it kind of reeks of sexism here. And no, the dumbass revelation in the final two episodes absolutely does not justify this at all, no matter how much it tries to.

In all honesty, the only good things Fena has going for it are the animation, done by Production IG, and to a lesser extent, the soundtrack. I say to a lesser extent because while I've always admired Yuki Kajiura's music, her work here doesn't sound as good as her previous stuff. It doesn't have a whole lot of oomph to it like her soundtracks for .Hack//Sign, Pandora Hearts, Madoka Magica, and Demon Slayer did, or even Sword Art Online, for that matter! Tl;dr, Fena is a show with a lot of potential that got squandered by trying to do way too much, and not enough with elements that could have worked had it actually gave a damn about them. Seriously, I could write a better version of this story! Fena is basically a knock-off of much better adventure shows, like Future Boy Conan, which was the first of its kind and laid the groundwork for the entire premise, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which is revered by all who saw it because of how much care and effort that was put into it, and is pretty much everything an adventure series should be. Fena tries to be like both shows, but completely lacking in the things that made the two I mentioned above so good, and there are reasons why those two anime are revered to this day.

And yet, having said all that...out of all the shows Crunchyroll has made, I have to begrudgingly say that this is actually the best one they've made. Tower of God and God of High School are just compressed adaptations of longer Korean webtoons, Gibiate was just a complete mess of a show that suffered from a lot of the same problems Fena did, I haven't seen Tonikawa, Onyx Equinox, or Spider Isekai, and I don't think I need to mention what an absolute trainwreck Ex-Arm turned out to be. But all in all, Fena: Pirate Princess is just a cheap cash grab that tries to emulate previous adventure anime while failing to execute any of its ideas in any meaningful ways. I'm just glad to finally be done with this and move on to something else. I'm gonna wait for High Guardian Spice to come out and see how that fares now that it's finally going to be released.
 
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Now here's an anime I can get behind! I started reviewing this last month, but didn't finish it until yesterday.

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Rating: 85/100

I pretty much knew nothing about this series until someone posted a review of the first part of the manga on Anime News Network, and that review pretty much made me want to buy it. I mean, hello? In this recent sea of bland isekai, bad ecchi, or generic media, when was the last time we had a genuine shoujo manga that actually had an intriguing story that harkened back to a lot of classics like Rose of Versailles and Glass Mask? Yeah, the whole idea of girls going to a specialized performing arts school has been done to death in other places, but my philosophy is that if you actually put effort into what you create and manage to make something compelling, complete with good execution and characters we can care about, then there's nothing wrong with reusing a well-worn premise. I actually bought the manga for Kageki Shojo as soon as I read that review, along with what little of it has been released here in the US so far, and liked it a lot, so you can bet as soon as the anime was announced, I was going to watch it without hesitation. So I'm glad to say that this series did meet my expectations, even when it covered parts of the manga that haven't come out in the US as of this writing.

The story takes place at a famous performing arts academy called the Kouka School of Musical and Theatrical Arts. It's basically a school version of the Takarazuka Revue and has been teaching girls since the Taisho era. Two very different girls, Ai Narata and Sarasa Watanabe, find themselves becoming classmates upon being accepted into the famous school, but they couldn't be more different. Ai, a stoic, emotionless girl, was kicked out of her old idol group after an incident with a fan, but this doesn't bother her, as she came to Kouka so she could live a life without being pursued by men. On the other hand, Sarasa is a tall, loud, chipper, energetic girl who loves anime and manga, and her reason for coming to Kouka is that she wants to star as Oscar in a production of The Rose of Versailles, having loved it since she was a kid. They, along with several other students they come to know, will have to learn to cooperate with one another if they have any hope of surviving Kouka's notoriously rigorous training, along with all the pressures and hardships that come from being in such a competitive setting.

One thing you'll notice about Kageki Shojo right off the bat is that it references and takes a lot of cues from both old school anime such as Rose of Versailles, and the famous Takarazuka Revue. For those not in the know, Takarazuka is basically an all-female acting troupe that is famous for putting on lavish, Broadway-style musicals that adapt everything from Western novels, shoujo manga, films, folktales, and on rare occasions, video games (Can you believe they did a series of musicals for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney of all things?). Rose of Versailles in particular is important because the Revue has performed multiple shows for it, and in-universe, it's the main inspiration for one of the lead characters' motivations for going to Kouka. That being said, both the anime and manga expect its readers/viewers to have some degree of knowledge of both. While it's not outright required, a lot of the references will fly over the heads of people who know absolutely nothing about Rose of Versailles or Takarazuka, especially the latter and how it operates. Whether you're knowledgeable about Takarazuka or not, it's made very clear that the people who worked on both the anime and manga for Kageki Shojo have a deep love and reverence for the performing arts. I mean, somebody made an entire Twitter thread dedicated to showing off all the references and setpieces that Kageki Shojo uses, from various landmarks all the way down to replicating real actors' poses. So I can give the anime props for actually caring about its source material and respecting the intricacies behind the performing arts, both showing off how great it is while refusing to gloss over some of the more dangerous parts of it, such as the overly competitive atmosphere and even some toxic attitudes. A series that really goes out of its way to pay close attention to its setting and the framework behind it deserves major props in my book.

The reverence for Takarazuka also shows in the animation, from replicating setpieces, actors, and performances down to the poses, like I mentioned earlier. Of course, Pine Jam did more than just simply copy the most well known parts of Takarazuka here. The animation is smooth, and the characters have simple designs that manage to toe the lie between being cartoony and realistic, even if some characters' hair colors don't exactly mesh well with the more realistic setting. Seriously, who's idea was it to have Sarasa's blonde hair have light green tips?! Plus, the backgrounds are nicely detailed, the performance sequences are well done, making good use of lighting and motion, and even some of the cartoony parts, like exaggerated facial expressions, aren't so pervasive that they ruin the show's overall tone. The soundtrack is okay, though I didn't find it to be too memorable except for the more orchestrated parts, like the ending theme song. I heard one person say that the show places inappropriate music for some scenes, making them feel dissonant with its intended atmosphere, such as playing soothing harp music while an adult man is leering at a 10-year-old girl, but personally, I disagree, though I think part of it is because the voice acting is louder than the music at times, so maybe I missed it. But I really don't think the soundtrack is as jarringly dissonant as that user says, though I have heard examples that are way worse about this, such as Nurse Angel Ririka SOS and Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, especially for the Japanese version of the latter.

A show like this lives or dies on its characters, and in that aspect, I think Kageki Shojo succeeds. Since this series only has 13 episodes, it doesn't have time to develop all of them, but it does keep the focus centered on a few important ones, mainly the ones depicted on the main key art. All of them receive time in the spotlight, showing what their strengths and weaknesses are, and why they chose to come to this particular school. Even the characters who might come across as really cliche and annoying, like Sarasa, are given more depth to them later on, and Kaoru's episode is easily the best one. One thing people will notice about Kageki Shojo is that it's not afraid to tackle serious, sensitive subject matter such as eating disorders, stalking, and child sexual abuse. Anime is no stranger to tough topics, but many of them do struggle with depicting them tastefully and not in a voyeuristic manner. Kageki Shojo manages to treat them well enough that it doesn't border on voyeuristic or purely for shock value, but it does tend to tie up the subplots involving them a little too neatly, with one example being the eating disorder subplot with one of the side characters. An eating disorder doesn't simply go away in a week just because someone encouraged her to keep going, though to be fair, the manga had the exact same problem, and apparently that was mainly because the authoress for the manga found out too late that the story was being moved to a different magazine and felt she needed to resolve it so as to not leave loose threads hanging. But that's a story for another review. Really, that's the only problem I had with Kageki Shojo is that it's too short and that it ties up certain subplots too neatly, but those aren't even exactly a mark against its overall quality.

There is one character I want to talk about, and that's Sarasa, and there's something I've noticed among anime when it comes to characters like her, particularly kids anime. I'm in the process of watching another anime called Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, and the main character of that show, Manatsu, pretty much has the same personality as Sarasa: Cheerful, enthusiastic, determined, and nice to everyone, even when people are being really mean to her. Here's the thing: It seems like most people who work on anime like this believe that if you have a character act brightly enough all the time, the audience will see them as cheerful characters, but rather than simply portray someone who's cheerful, they make the mistake of making them so over-the-top cheerful that it becomes their sole character trait. They don't show them as having any other emotions than being overly happy and zany all the time. My problem with Manatsu is that, after 30-something episodes, she hasn't shown any other emotions than being over-the-top happy and zany, constantly shouting "Tropica-shine!" every two seconds, and the few times she acts anything but happy is played for laughs. She's not allowed to be vulnerable or even act like a normal human being, which annoys the shit out of me. Sarasa, on the other hand, is an example of this type of character done right, especially in her focus episodes. Yes, she's shown as being cheerful and annoying at times, but the creators actually allow her to show emotions other than mindless happiness. They allow her to be angry, sad, jealous, insecure, the whole gamut of emotions, which actually make her into a more well-rounded person. She has moments where she's vulnerable and insecure, and she has to feel other emotions when playing characters in a play, because if you don't put yourself in that character's shoes or just copy someone else's take on it, you're nothing. It's the same thing with the two Cinderellas from both Disney movies, the 1950 one and the 2015 live-action remake. The former, while not the most proactive character, feels more like a human being and actually gives a shit about the situation she's in, whereas the 2015 movie tried way too hard to make her smart and independent while accidentally making her more passive and like an overly happy zombie who doesn't even try to do anything about her situation. What makes or breaks a character is how they deal with their flaws, because rather than simply make a character one thing and nothing else, they need to be interesting first. Tl;dr, Sarasa from Kageki Shojo is a better genki girl than Manatsu from Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure because Sarasa is allowed to be flawed and act like a human being.

Alright, I better get off this soapbox. If you're looking for a show that actually cares about its material, definitely check out Kageki Shojo if you can. It's an underrated gem that absolutely deserves more love than it gets.
 
Oh yay, back on the bad stuff train. This review was written on October 15th, 2021.

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Rating: 50/100

Man, I expected to just write a smaller review for The Gilded Girl, but this wound up giving me a lot more to talk about than I thought. Though...in the case of The Gilded Girl, I don't mean this as a compliment. To be perfectly honest, I didn't like this one, mainly because it felt so derivative. The story takes place in the early 20th century, but where magic is common, and a rich girl named Emma Harris is sent to a fancy magical boarding school by her father. But when her father dies and she's left penniless, the greedy headmistress, Miss Posterity, forces her to become a servant and treats her worse than dirt. To complicate matters further, Emma learns that only rich kids are allowed to utilize their magic to their fullest potential, whereas people of the lower classes, like her new servant friend Izzy, are forced to have it snuffed out even as the time of their magic kindling comes around. When a classmate's kindling goes haywire, Emma and Izzy have to work together to make things right.

I'm not going to mince words here: The Gilded Girl feels like a complete rip-off of A Little Princess, using the exact same premise, characters, time period, and story beats as it. Emma is Sara, Izzy is a more strong-willed version of Becky, Frances is Ermengarde, Beatrice is Lavinia, Miss Posterity is Miss Minchin, Clementine is Amelia, and so on. Even the order of events that happen is the exact same as A Little Princess. Rich girl gets sent to rich girl school? Check. Father dies, loses all her money, and is abused by the mean headmistress? Check. Mysterious man is looking for her but is made to go on a wild goose chase due to lack of details and false leads? Checkity check check. Even the magical elements such as the talking cat and kindlings feel tacked on in a bad attempt to hide the fact that the story is basically a rehash of A Little Princess. Take the fantasy elements away, and it's basically A Little Princess in all but name.

The only good thing I can say about the book is that the prose is fine, and it's decently well written for a book aimed at 8-12 year olds. As far as the characters ago, not only are they all bland and carbon copies of other characters from other books, even their development is woefully predictable, and they don't even change much throughout the book. Everything that the characters go through feels painfully obvious if you either have knowledge of A Little Princess or are familiar with the archetypes from other media. The only characters that don't feel like they were ripped out of A Little Princess were Tom and Figgy, but even they don't stand out enough to really feel interesting. In fact, I can't bring myself to care about any of the characters because they're just copies of all the ones from A Little Princess but without anything to really make them feel like they're characters in their own right.

With that being said, these days, it's impossible to create an original story anymore. I hold the belief that there's no such thing as originality anymore, and that execution matters. You can have the most cliche story in the world but if you actually care to create well-developed, believable characters that can drive said story, or even do something new with it, you can write anything. But there's a difference between expanding on an idea and doing something new with it, and simply adding something to an old story without doing anything with it. To me, The Gilded Girl is the latter, because if you take away the fantastical elements, it's basically a carbon copy of A Little Princess that makes absolutely no attempt to do anything new with its premise or stand on its own two feet. From what I understand, this is the writer's debut novel, and...it shows. Here's hoping she can write better, more polished novels in the future. Honestly, I'd skip The Gilded Girl, as there are plenty of other novels that do this same premise better, or don't try to shamelessly rip it off.
 
This review was written on July 21st, 2012. An underrated magical girl anime that deserves more love and recognition, I feel.

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Rating: 88/100.

During the early to mid nineties, Sailor Moon was sweeping the nation, both Japan and America, being one of the first magical girl anime to make it big in the US, and becoming wildly popular in Japan, so much so that it trumped other shows airing in Japan around the same time, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS being one of them. I first discovered this on Anime News Network in the form of a Buried Treasure article. Naturally, I got interested, so I tracked down the first episode and watched it. Unfortunately, I didn't get into the habit of completing shows quite yet (it was around the time I was eating up Shounen Onmyouji like a hungry wolf), so it took me a VERY long time to get back into this. Thankfully, I eventually did, and I'm glad of it, as, while it starts off as rather cliche, it definitely stands out from other magical girl shows. It's sweet, charming, genuine, sincere, and when it comes to tear jerkers, it does NOT mess around.

Our main character, Ririka Moriya, is just a normal girl who goes to school and squabbles with her friend Seiya like cats and dogs. Her father works as a doctor, so she's familiar with lots of medical issues. One day, on her birthday, she receives a gift from the cutest, most popular guy in school, Nozomu Kanou. But the gift is a nurse's hat, and she isn't quite sure what it is until monsters begin attacking. When she puts on the nurse's cap, she becomes the Nurse Angel to fight them off. As it turns out, Nozomu's real name is Kanon, and he's from a planet called Queen Earth, which has been destroyed by the evil organization called Dark Joker, and now they're closing in on Earth. In order to defeat them, the Nurse Angel has to find the elusive Flower of Life. But she's having some trouble taking her duties seriously, but when things get serious, she steps up to the challenge.

The animation is your typical shoujo-y nineties look: big eyes, soft colors, elegant transformations, etc. It's not bad, though! I thought it looked a lot better than Sailor Moon at times! It does its job well, and I didn't see any corners that got cut. The soundtrack...eh. Do you ever come across a show/movie where the producers throw in music that's completely unfitting for certain scenes? Like, for example, playing happy, cheesy, and hopeful music during a really sad and tear jerking moment? Unfortunately, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS has fallen into this trap. Now don't get me wrong, the soundtrack for the series IS very good. It's composed by the guy who went on to do the soundtracks for Rozen Maiden and Yu-Gi-Oh. For the most part, the soundtrack fits the atmosphere well for low key scenes, but...for certain tear jerking scenes, they play the series' light and hopeful leitmotif, which I thought really dampened the scenes' emotional weight. I won't say which scenes due to spoilers. But be on the lookout, because it'll stick out like a sore thumb and be VERY hard to ignore.

The characters, understandably, start off rather cliche. We have the happy and energetic lead female (who, happily enough, ISN'T a ditz!), her childhood guy friend who she fights with a lot, the mysterious cute guy who gives her powers, her two gal pals, the female arch enemy who's trying to win the mysterious cute guy's affection, the evil characters trying to take over the world, etc. But after a while, they really start to grow into genuine and likable characters, especially with the twists that the show pulls off. Even though they look and act cliche at first sight, they actually develop quite nicely, and even avert some of the common magical girl tropes. For example, Ririka's powers are dependent on a kind of liquid, and if she runs out, she can't use her powers, and even has to retreat at some points. I found that a really good use of magical girl items, as most of them usually just have an endless supply of magic and energy, and if the energy source is low, it creates more tension. Plus, I really liked the episode that developed the female clique leader who hates Ririka. The only characters I didn't really like are Mimina and her fairy friend whose name escapes me, but even they get better near the end.

The show itself is fun, nice, light-hearted, but still genuinely tasteful and full of heart. But do be warned, when things get serious, BY GOD do they ever! Especially the ending. I won't spoil it, but I will tell you this: if you watch it, everything you thought Nurse Angel Ririka SOS was gets torn to pieces and hacked at. No, the ending is NOT bad. It's actually extremely good! It's daring, it's bold, and doesn't give a rat's hat about any cliches or anything stupid like that! It's actually a really ballsy move, as most kids shows don't even DARE tread on this kind of territory! Not even to this day, and this is what sets Ririka apart from other magical girl anime, and it's MUCH better off for it! I love what it pulled! From what I hear, there were supposed to be three more episodes to really close off the series and resolve some plot threads, but apparently they never got aired due to low merchandise sales, which I can understand, considering Sailor Moon was still trumping every other show airing at the time.

If you're looking for a fun and sweet magical girl anime to give you your magical girl fix, but isn't completely saccharine, I wholly recommend this. Here's hoping Discotek Media picks it up for a BR release someday, especially since the guy who wrote the article works for Discotek now!
 
This review was written on November 9th, 2021.

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Rating: 90/100.

I don't quite remember how I first learned about Siuil a Run: The Girl From The Other Side, but I think it might have been seeing this review of the first volume a few years ago. I was intrigued by the premise, and wanted a new manga to read. But as soon as I read the first volume, I immediately sought out every other volume that had been put out, and continued to do so until the very end, which just got released recently. Then I saw the absolutely marvelous 10-minute OVA put out by Wit Studio, which I already did a review of, and I don't think I need to belabor my feelings on that here. This year, the manga officially concluded, even though there's going to be a special 12th volume that focuses on side stories and some new material. There's no word on when that'll be out, but you can bet I'll be devouring that like a wolf when it comes out. That being said, you'll notice that I gave it a slightly lower rating than the OVA, and trust me, this doesn't mean I think the manga is bad or anything. Far from it. But now that I've read the entirety of the manga, I do have a lot to say about it.

An unnamed fantasy world is divided in two: The inside and the outside. The outside is populated by black, monstrous beings known as Outsiders, and if a human were to ever touch them, they would be cursed and turned into an Outsider as well. As such, humans fear the outsiders, retreating into the local kingdom while the areas infected by the curse lay abandoned. Oddly enough, a little girl named Shiva is adopted by an Outsider simply known as Teacher, and the two of them live a tranquil, happy life in a tiny cottage in the woods. But their bliss is short-lived when pursuers, Outsiders and soldiers from the inside, intend on using Shiva for their own ends, and will stop at nothing to capture her. What could both sides want with Shiva? Does she have some sort of connection to the curse? What even is the truth behind the curse? What secrets does Teacher hold, and with the Outsiders questioning if he's truly one of their own, what even is he? Can the two of them truly find peace in a world that's plagued with terror, or is their tale doomed to end in tragedy?

One thing you'll notice about the art for this manga is that it really does an impeccable job of setting the mood and atmosphere. From the heavy usage of grey space, to cross-hatching for shadows, and a mixture of thin and thick likes both for backgrounds and characters' bodies, it truly makes you feel like you've been transported to a largely abandoned world, giving it a very unsettling atmosphere, which is fitting for the story and its overall themes. That being said, with the story having very few humans in the story, their facial features are often drawn as very simplistic, with only the bare minimum needed to give a sense of their expressions. Shiva's especially, since she's often drawn in a chibi style, which does get more detailed whenever she's drawn closer to the frame. It's not like the mangaka intentionally skimps on details, mainly preferring to save them for when they're absolutely necessary, which works depending on the situation. There is an emphasis on body language being indicative of a character's mood, and considering most of the cast consists of demonic beings that don't have human faces, Nagabe really puts this to good use here.

But no matter how good the artwork is, a story can't work if it doesn't have an equally good cast of characters backing it up, and thankfully, The Girl From The Other Side understands this wonderfully. The two main characters do an excellent job of carrying the manga, even though some of the more important actions are carried out by other characters when it comes to learning about the true nature of the world they live in. Shiva is more than just a bratty child and Teacher is more than just a demon who takes care of her. Every character has a role to play here and serve their purpose well. My only gripe is that I wish Nagabe had given most of the characters names. We only know certain characters by their titles or familial relations, like Shiva's aunt, the king, or the head priest, and because of that, along with how the human designs are simpler than those of the monsters, it can be hard to tell who's who most of the time. Granted, one character's name is kept a secret deliberately, that much is fine, but I think, had Nagabe given other characters names, it'd be easier to keep track of them. Since the OVA only focuses on Shiva and Teacher and nobody else, it manages to avoid this problem by sticking to just one part of the story.

However, that's not the only flaw The Girl From The Other Side has. Believe me, I really wish I could exalt this as a masterpiece, as it has a lot that really appeals to me. It's a series that's wonderfully told and constantly evolving. But I think it starts to slip a bit during some of the final chapters, when Shiva's true nature really comes to light. Without spoiling anything, the later reveals just seem to contradict each other, and it does leave a lot of questions and subplots unresolved. The final few chapters are less impressive than the rest of the series because of trying to tie up loose ends in ways that seem contradictory. Personally though, the final arc is more of a minor annoyance than a reason not to read this manga. Plus, the final volume does say there's going to be a 12th volume that'll not only feature some side stories, but some new material that, for all we know, may or may not resolve those lingering issues.

With all this in mind, what's the verdict? Basically, Siuil a Run: The Girl From The Other Side is a fun, spooky, engaging manga that, although it has a shallow ending and leaves some things unresolved, absolutely deserves the love and recognition that it gets. It didn't overstay its welcome, I can't wait for the 12th volume, and I definitely can't wait for the new OVA by Wit Studio due to come out in March 2022...assuming they don't get crushed by their recent financial troubles, that is.
 
I attempted to write a review of this on September 17th, 2017, but didn't finish writing it until today. Whoops.

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Rating: 82/100

Sanrio is well known for marketing their cute characters like Hello Kitty, My Melody, Batz Maru, and so on. But back in the seventies and eighties, they actually made very ambitious original movies that were considerably darker in tone than the image the company is known to project. Ringing Bell, Nutcracker Fantasy, the Unico movies, Sea Prince and the Fire Child, and the subject of this review, A Journey Through Fairyland, also known as Fairy Florence. I'm going to refer to it by its Japanese title, as the English one is too long to say. After finishing Sea Prince, Sanrio tagged Masami Hata to direct another original movie, and he was more than happy to take up the task. Unfortunately, he wound up getting too ambitious with Fairy Florence for his own good. The film took four years to produce, and it cost a lot of money to make, so much so that it basically caused Sanrio Films to shut down. Fairy Florence wound up being a bomb at the box office and there was no way it could make back the money put into its production. It didn't help that around that time, Sanrio wanted to move away from making big budget original movies and move into merchandising characters such as Hello Kitty for all they were worth. These are very likely the reasons why it's the most obscure film in Sanrio's movie catalog. But why did it fail to gather an audience?

The story is a fairly simple one. Michael is a young boy attending a prestigious music academy. He's under a lot of pressure to succeed, as his late parents were famous musicians, but he can't seem to play his oboe during orchestra practice. He spends most of his days at the local greenhouse, caring for the flowers as if they were his children. But he's often late to class and ill-practiced, unwittingly becoming the class clown as a result. The teacher tries to be patient, but after one incident too many, Michael is kicked out of school. Crushed by this outcome, he goes to the greenhouse one last time...and meets a beautiful flower fairy named Florence, who reaches out to him and invites him to the magical Land of Flowers, where they can live in escapist harmony. But they have to find a way to get there without Treble, the mischievous sprite, and his gang of lazy musical blobs, the Mokomoko. But Treble winds up becoming the least of their problems.

I first discovered the movie through this article here, as I did other anime that I've come to like, but it wasn't until Discotek Media released it on DVD in 2017 when it came back into print. I immediately bought the set as soon as I was able. One thing Fairy Florence absolutely has going for it is the animation, which is simply incredible, especially by 1985 standards. Animated with one cel per frame, which is considered a very massive undertaking that not even Disney or Ghibli does. Every movement is smooth and lifelike, and the visuals absolutely burst with color. It's like it came straight out of the 1940s, which is apt considering Hata was a huge fan of Disney's Fantasia. The giant bug monsters near the end are especially well animated and visceral. Visually and musically, Fairy Florence is very Fantasia-inspired, with segments dedicated to characters dancing across the screen in musical montages with very impressionistic direction. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a direct spin-off of Fantasia. The soundtrack mainly consists of famous pieces of classical music used to set the mood, atmosphere, and feel of the various adventures Michael experiences in the magical lands Treble and Florence take him through. One thing I appreciate about the movie is that it displays the names and composers of the various pieces used throughout the movie for anyone who isn't familiar with them, which is definitely a plus for me, as I've never heard of Offenbach's stuff, or singular pieces like Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, or Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dance. Of course, composer Naozumi Yamamoto sprinkles in his own BGMs as well. The soundtrack is an absolute joy, and every piece of music used here works to the movie's advantage.

However, pretty animation and a gorgeous soundtrack can't exactly hide the fact that the movie's story and characters are...rather trite and juvenile. The entire story is just Michael being whisked away into a magical land consisting of long scenes where flowers twirl, fairies dance across the screen, musical notes fly all over the place, and so on. The basic plotline is pretty thin, and Michael and Florence are rather bland as characters. Michael's just a kid who does go through decent development, but said development is pretty predictable for characters like him, and Florence is just an overly sweet, idealized woman who loves Michael just because and does everything solely for him. Treble is pretty okay, as he's just a mischievous sprite and probably the personification of Michael's love for music. Personally though, I think the movie works better if you imagine Treble and Florence being anthropomorphized personifications of his interests competing for his attention, and the worlds they create being metaphors for his differing passions. The musical sequences themselves mostly look pretty but don't further the story much, though one could argue that the story and characters were never meant to be the focal point of the film. Oh, and the English dub, while technically okay, is kind of heavy on hammy and melodramatic acting, name changes, and unneeded narration.

So basically, Fairy Florence is just a gigantic love letter to Fantasia, putting more emphasis on the animation and music than the story and characters, and I can understand why Hata wanted to go hog wild with it and make this his personal magnum opus, even if it meant Sanrio couldn't make more movies like this ever again. Sadly, audiences didn't appreciate his efforts for this movie and it didn't make its money back at the box office. Not only that, movies like this one just can't be made in this day and age anymore, and it's a pity, because Fairy Florence showcases Japanese animation at its absolute zenith and was clearly made with a lot of love and passion that you don't see in modern anime. Of course, now it's more widely available thanks to Discotek rescuing it from obscurity. Basically, Fairy Florence is an avant-garde family art film that, while nothing to write home about in the story department, is visual poetry personified, and even if it may not be one of Sanrio's best films, I do think it deserves more love than it got, especially if you're an animation fan in general.
 
This review was just finished today.

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Rating: 85/100.

Hakumei and Mikochi is a series I initially skipped out on when it first aired. Not for any reason, as the premise did appeal to my tastes and I put it on my list of anime I planned to watch, but at the time it came out, I was burnt out on anime. From 2010 to the end of 2015, I watched a ton of anime...but after I graduated college, I felt myself unable to watch even a single episode per month unless it was a new episode of Pokemon. A number of things contributed to this for me: Too much time on my hands, too many titles that had elements that turned me off, job hunting with no success, cyberbullying in one particular fandom, having seen too many shows, and so on. Anime always brought me joy, and I honestly tried to get back into it, but I couldn't muster up the motivation to go back to what I did before. I just couldn't get myself in the frame of mind to watch anything anymore, even the shows I really loved. Then the crapshow that was 2020 happened and one day, I watched an episode of an anime. And another. And another. Slowly but surely, I found myself going back to the old routine that sustained me throughout my school years. I think I finally managed to claw myself out of it. Not completely, but I'm feeling a lot better and more motivated than I was before. To think it actually took a pandemic for me to get back into the medium that brought me so much joy throughout my life. In that regard, I finally managed to watch and finish shows I was interested in watching, with Hakumei and Mikochi being one of them. God, this series is so cute and sweet and deserves way more love than it gets!

But what is Hakumei and Mikochi about, anyway? In an unnamed fantasy land, talking animals and people reaching only a few inches tall co-exist in peace. Two such tiny people, Hakumei and Mikochi, live together in a house built into a tree. Hakumei is a tomboyish, energetic carpenter, while the more feminine, reserved, responsible Mikochi is a tailor and cook who sells her work to nearby establishments. The two are pretty different, but they get along well and spend every day together in harmony. They work, go on sightseeing adventures, take shopping trips, and interact with the various people and animals in their hometown Makinata. Basically, it's a low key fantasy slice-of-life story about two women who live together, and if you're confused as to how old Hakumei and Mikochi are, the series makes it pretty clear that, even though their character designs are deliberately chibi-esque and child-like, they're fully grown adults.

One thing Hakumei and Mikochi really excels at is making use of its setting. Since the main characters, and other tiny humanoids like them, are only a few inches tall, smaller than most animals even, the series takes great pains to show how much bigger the world would seem to their perspective. A mouse would be small to us, but bigger than our two main characters. In fact, the series really has an incredible sense of detail. Both Hakumei and Mikochi are shown doing tasks that most other shows would take for granted, like acquiring food, cooking, sewing clothes, using different types of dye and what conditions create certain colors, sharpening their tools, and so on. Most anime would only show just one or two scenes like this, but for Hakumei and Mikochi, it's part of their daily life, as it would be for other people in real life. They're always doing something meaningful that, even if it may not impact the story, brings a lot of life to both them as characters and the world they live in. Granted, there are other shows that have done this better, but since most anime tend to take a lot of these things for granted, I'm giving Hakumei and Mikochi an A+ for this one.

This extends to the characters as well, namely our main duo. The show also takes great pains to show what these two girls are like, their hobbies, their personalities, and just how they manage to live together in spite of their differences. Hakumei is an energetic tomboy who eats a lot, but she's also a hard worker and takes her jobs very seriously, something one wouldn't expect out of characters that follow that archetype. Mikochi is more feminine and often keeps her in life, but the series treats her as very proactive, and her hobbies and talents are treated with just as much respect as Hakumei's. Both have their strengths, weaknesses, and talents and compliment each other perfectly. It helps that the side characters are pretty good as well, even if I wish more had been done with them. The only character I admittedly don't like is Conju, mainly because she's kind of a stuck-up brat who frequently causes trouble, though even she's fairly mild compared to other, far worse and more mean-spirited characters in other anime I've seen.

The artwork and animation was done by a newer studio called Lerche, who previously animated shows like Astra: Lost In Space, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, Monster Musume, and Radiant. While the characters don't display much in terms of movement and motion (Though Hanako-kun is a lot worse about this), the series makes up for it with lush backgrounds and a subdued, low key artstyle that perfectly conveys the sheer beauty of the world around our two leads. I've heard that some people took issue with Lerche's usage of manga-style panels for certain parts, but I personally wasn't bothered by them. I thought that they worked just fine for the scenes they were used for, and weren't overused. The soundtrack is also a joy to listen to, with every piece fitting the feel and atmosphere of the series, from loud, energetic cowboy fiddles to soft, soothing piano music for the quieter parts. Honestly, the only thing I can see people take issue with is that it's deliberately slow paced and lacking in action. This isn't a series for people who want to see blood-pumping fights or guys screaming at each other constantly. Hakumei and Mikochi is a slice-of-life through and through and knows what its supposed to be. That being said, I'm admittedly not a fan of episode 8, because its whole tone and premise felt jarring and out of place for a series like this. It's not a bad episode or anything, but it just seemed to come out of nowhere and really clashed with the rest of the series. But it's just one episode out of twelve, so I think I can let it slide.

In terms of iyashikei series, Hakumei and Mikochi is one of the best the genre has to offer. It's a sweet, charming little time-killer that's perfect for when you want to wrap yourself in a blanket, sit by the fireplace, drink hot chocolate, and relax on a snowy winter day. It's sweet, its wholesome, and definitely worth your time if you're willing to give it a chance.
 
This review was written on November 24th, 2021.

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Rating: 78/100.

So...this anime literally came right out of nowhere. Announced in September 2021, premiering not even weeks afterward, it caught a lot of people by surprise, especially the staff behind it. Directed by Naoko Yamada, who left KyoAni to join Science SARU which did the animation, with a screenplay by Reiko Yoshida, adapting one of Japan's oldest pieces of literature. I was all in. I mean, one of anime's most beloved female directors working on a show that promised beautiful animation and gripping political intrigue, taking place in the Heian era and starring a female lead? How could I not want to watch it? In an endless sea of generic ecchi and bottom-of-the-barrel isekai that get churned out every year, I was damn ecstatic to watch Heike Monogatari. It's no secret that my favorite anime of all time is Shounen Onmyouji, which is also based on literature that takes place during the Heian era and has supernatural leanings (Though Shounen Onmyouji is based on light novels). I was sure I was going to absolutely adore Heike Monogatari. But in case the rating didn't clue you in, I might have set my expectations too high.

Nobody knows who wrote the original Tale of the Heike, though this particular anime is based on the modern Japanese rendition by one Hideo Furukawa, and Heike Monogatari is the first animated adaptation of the epic novel. The anime's story goes as follows: Biwa is a young girl who has the gift of seeing into the future, but is told by her father to hide it. When her father is killed by the Taira clan's personal enforcers, Biwa is left an orphan until a member of the Taira (also known as the Heike), Shigemori, hears of her plight. Taking pity on her and because he himself can see spirits of the dead, therefore seeing in her a kindred spirit, he adopts her and makes her part of his family as a means of atoning for what his family did to her. But Biwa sees visions of the Taira clan meeting a bloody, violent end. Being a child and unable to do anything in her position, she can do naught but watch as the Heike's decisions and desire for power lead to their own downfall.

As much as I want to praise this anime up the wazoo, and believe me, you have no idea how much I want to, I can no longer deny its two biggest flaws. One is that the story Heike Monogatari tells is way too big to fit into a piddly eleven episodes. It's a big, sprawling epic that spans years and years, from the perspectives of a ton of different characters and showing how their actions directly or indirectly lead up to the great Genpei War. A story like this would be better told in, at the very least, 26 episodes, or at most, probably 39 or 52. Remember when anime that had that many episodes were the norm? And not just shounen anime? Because of how compressed the adaptation is, the pacing is very fast, leaving you with very little time to process all the big events that happen back to back to back, like a bunch of entitled soldiers burning a temple because the monks refused to let them use their bath, or Kiso no Yoshinaka razing the capital with his army for all it's worth. That being said, Heike Monogatari hardly leaves a moment for the audience to get bored, so there's always something going on to catch the viewer's interest. But that can also come with its own set of issues.

One of which is Heike Monogatari's second biggest flaw: This anime absolutely expects the viewer to be familiar with the original source material. It just throws a bunch of characters, names, and events at you in huge infodumps and exposition diatribes without much in the way of context, and doesn't even try to make an effort to allow the audience to get familiar with them, or show them in an organic manner. As someone who hasn't read the original novel, I was often very confused by the fact that Heike Monogatari seemed to randomly introduce new characters and situations in every episode at a breakneck pace, and even after several episodes, I could barely keep track of them. It doesn't help that many of the characters were hard to tell apart at times. Like, come on. I dare anyone to tell me they can tell Shigemori and Tokitada apart, especially since the former's left eye is such a subtle color difference from the other that it's still hard to tell who's who! And because of the anime's desire to just throw characters at you a mile a minute, any attempts to flesh them out come off as hollow because show's breakneck pacing doesn't allow itself to really delve into who they are as people, what makes them tick, why we should care about them, or even their states of mind as certain things happen. That being said, I don't want to be a Negative Nancy, and there are some characters who are very well fleshed out, like Biwa, Shigemori, Sukemori, and Tokuko. I found those four to be the most compelling, as we get to see them grow and change over the course of the series, even if I wish several scenes they starred in could have been presented with more focus and importance than they were. For example, Biwa's search for her mother and the end result of it is treated as mundane and an afterthought, and you'd think something like that would be hugely significant considering Biwa's, well, the main character. Koremori in particular was also a victim of this, as he could have been a more central character considering all the pressure he had on his shoulders, but the anime flip-flops between characters every other scene, making it hard to flesh them out in ways they deserve.

This is a more minor flaw, but sometimes the show has cases of pretty severe mood whiplash. For example, in episode 1, when Shigemori first discovers Biwa, she tearfully begs him to kill her...and in the very next scene, his maidservants are cartoonishly gawking at how poorly dressed she is, complete with cutesy music and cartoony expressions. Granted, this only happens twice, but they did feel pretty jarring to me. Of course, that being said, Heike Monogatari does have a lot to offer even with its flaws holding it down. For one, the animation is definitely unlike most anime and it's really a visual marvel. Naoko Yamada has always had a liking for live-action camera techniques, digital tools, and visual symbolism, light leaks, and so on, and a lot of the techniques she uses here really work, like depth of field, bloom lighting, and chromatic aberration. Every shot is packed with detail and used with purpose, from the sleek movement of the characters in motion to the impeccably watercolor/ukiyo-e style backgrounds conveying an almost otherworldly wonder about it. Pack that with a stellar voice cast and an eclectic but still mostly fitting soundtrack and you've got a recipe for greatness in terms of both sight and sound. So yeah, please don't think I hate Heike Monogatari, because I don't. Even though it's plagued by a lot of problems that prevent it from being considered a true masterpiece in every sense of the word, it still does have a lot to offer, and it's clear Yamada-san and her team put a lot of love, care, and effort into it. It didn't quite succeed, as it's short episode length leaves Heike Monogatari unable to live up to the huge story it wanted to tell, but as far as Yamada-san's first foray at Science Saru goes, I still think she hit a home run, and we still have ourselves a relatively good series here. Hell, if I was made to choose between this and the 800 bottom-of-the-barrel isekai that Japan likes to churn out, I'd pick Heike, no contest.

By the way, there is something else I'd like to mention as well: Just because an anime simply depicts problematic material, especially in the context of the setting and time period in which it takes place, that absolutely does not mean the show is promoting or encouraging it. Some dude on MAL gave Heike a low rating because they were under the impression that because it dared to show Tokuko's nine-year-old sister being married off to an adult man, a practice which, while definitely unacceptable in modern times, was considered commonplace back in the Heian era, that somehow the show was glamorizing or encouraging pedophilia. Uh...no. Heike Monogatari is absolutely NOT condoning pedophilia. If it was trying to do so, it would have made Moriko's marriage to an older man out to be a good thing, and there is nothing in the anime that does anything of the like. In fact, the anime subtly shows that Moriko's life turned out terrible when she was forced to marry. Seriously, people need to look more into the time period in which Heike Monogatari takes place. In the Heian era, women and children had absolutely no rights, agency, or autonomy. They had their lives dictated by others, whether it be family members or their husbands, and were forced to be submissive to those in power, even if women had positions of power, and any deviation from the norm would have either branded them as a pariah or gotten them killed, and even Heike Monogatari understands this. As someone who studied Japanese history in college, I can tell you for certain that Heike's depiction of both the time period and the questionable ethics behind marrying off underage girls for the sake of political alliances is fairly accurate. Besides, if that person thinks Heike is actively encouraging pedophilia or sexual assault, they ought to watch shows like Kodomo no Jikan, Daimidaler, every anime that sexualizes teenage girls (Which is about 80% of them, and Heike is not one of them), or pretty much every lolicon-centered hentai ever. Or that one movie called American Beauty, which is about a married, middle-aged man actively lusting over his teenaged daughter's best friend and has uncensored, underage nudity, and the movie outright encouraging his behavior. Make of that what you will.

With that, I think Heike Monogatari can be considered a flawed masterpiece. It really tries to be something good, and it is good, but because of how dense it is, I don't recommend this as baby's first grown-up anime. Not by a long shot.
 
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Hey just wanted to say I decided to check out Heike Monogatari based on your review (it sounded like my kind of thing) on my sick day today and OMG I love it. It helps that I was pre-warned about the ridiculous pace and cast size, so my expectations on the depth of the story and my ability to follow every plot point are realistic. But otherwise the work is a piece of art. Every cut is stunning and the music, ugh :love: That soaring bit of war music just makes me implode.

Like you the one thing that grates is the forced insertion of some cutesy/‘funny’ anime tropes which are really out of keeping with the tone of the production otherwise. I honestly don’t understand why they’ve tried. But it hasn’t broken my immersion overly much.

I’m 6 episodes in so looking forward to finishing the series probably tomorrow. (The short length might have damaged its ability to properly tell the story but honestly it’s the one thing that makes it accessible to the viewer when time is limited to commit to a long runner!)
 
Hey just wanted to say I decided to check out Heike Monogatari based on your review (it sounded like my kind of thing) on my sick day today and OMG I love it. It helps that I was pre-warned about the ridiculous pace and cast size, so my expectations on the depth of the story and my ability to follow every plot point are realistic. But otherwise the work is a piece of art. Every cut is stunning and the music, ugh :love: That soaring bit of war music just makes me implode.

Like you the one thing that grates is the forced insertion of some cutesy/‘funny’ anime tropes which are really out of keeping with the tone of the production otherwise. I honestly don’t understand why they’ve tried. But it hasn’t broken my immersion overly much.

I’m 6 episodes in so looking forward to finishing the series probably tomorrow. (The short length might have damaged its ability to properly tell the story but honestly it’s the one thing that makes it accessible to the viewer when time is limited to commit to a long runner!)

Oh cool! So glad one of my reviews convinced you to watch it! The English dub is also coming out right now if you want to check that out, too.

This review was just finished today, and it's one of my shorter ones to date.

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Rating: 69/100.

(This review covers both the first season and the second one, Bananya and the Curious Bunch)

Now here's an anime that I'm sure not a whole lot of people know about. Bananya is a short TV series that's literally about the adventures of cute pocket-sized kittens that live in banana peels. That's it. It's a very simple premise, and the first season mainly shows them going through mundane situations, like going inside the refridgerator, or trying to greet a stray cat outside the kitchen window. Every episode is 2-3 minutes long and there's no real dialogue except for a narrator who tells us what's going on. Now, if you're looking to watch this, I should warn you, the story is pretty episodic, and the characters don't really develop beyond their one singular personality trait. In this case, it can be forgiven, as they're cats that can't talk, and the first season has a rather small set of characters that are easy to follow, even if four of them look exactly the same.

On the more technical aspects, the animation is fine for what it is, matching the simplistic tone and feel of the show, but I have to wonder if Bananya was animated using Adobe Flash. It doesn't look hand drawn, and the art style reminds me of this newer web show airing on YouTube right now called Hello Kitty and Friends: Supercute Adventures, but with less noticeable gaps in the linework. But don't come in here expecting animation on the level of Akira. The soundtrack is fine and sweet, though it gets repetitive very quickly. Oh, and for anyone who likes English dubs, Discotek Media dubbed the first season, and not only that, they had someone dub the ending theme song! And it's actually well sung, and by a fairly well known internet personality who's done plenty of covers for anime songs on YouTube.

So yeah, Bananya's first season doesn't have much to talk about, but is a short, sweet little time killer if you want to relax. The second season, on the other hand, goes in a completely different direction. The animation and music are the same, but we're introduced to a whole new cast of characters save for Bananya, and the second season establishes that Bananyas come from another planet near Earth, which is where our titular character Bananya comes from. Again, like the first series, it doesn't really try to develop its characters beyond their core personality trait, and some of the new Bananyas look kind of ridiculous, like Emo Bananya and Rainbow Bananya. Yes, really. The second season eschews slice-of-life in favor of zany fantasy comedy, and I didn't mind it too much, and it's eventually revealed near the end that Bananya and the Curious Bunch is actually a prequel to the first season. But in general, both series achieve what they want to do and are pretty interchangeable.

Simply put, Bananya is a nice little time killer if you want to gush over cute anime kitties, but it doesn't really offer much beyond that. It's not a bad anime by any means, and I did smile whenever I saw those little munchkins playing around, but it's saccharine sweet, wholesome, and it'll probably take you a little under an hour to complete. Bananya's not going to bring the house down, but it doesn't need to, and it was never meant to be anything except what it is, and that's okay.
 
This review was just finished today. Season two of an underrated gem!

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Rating: 85/100.

2021 was a pretty good year for anime on most accounts, and one of the most pleasant surprises I've seen was a little show called Yakunara Mug Cup mo, about girls learning about pottery and making ceramics. I watched the first season and fell in love with it, but I was convinced it would be one of those shows that would end at 12 episodes and then fall into obscurity. So imagine my surprise when it was immediately announced that there'd be a second season! Of course, I knew I'd devour it the second it came out, and as you can see here, I did! Taking place immediately after the first season, Himeno Toyokawa learns more about the different kinds of pottery and ceramics every day, and even learns more about her mother and how she influenced the world of ceramics back in her day. But after a while, Himeno decides she wants to make her own, distinctive piece because of a suggestion her father made, but she mind wind up putting too much pressure on herself in doing so.

Most sequels to media aren't very well received because they either try to be too ambitious, or reuse the same formula over and over again but with less inspiration than before. All Yakumo really does is just build on what made the first series good and explore the ideas it established further. The animation and music quality are both the same, so those haven't changed much, but the characters grow from the previous season, and their development is very subtle and well done, expanding on what they were in the first season. We also get to learn more about Touko's past and her issues with her grandfather. Though...as much as I liked Touko's backstory and how it culminated in the end, there's one huge part of it that absolutely baffles me to no end, and the show doesn't really try to explain that part in greater detail, and it just left me confused. I also liked that the creators gave Nao a bit more focus here, as I felt like she was little more than the basic comic relief in the first season.

Not only that, the show introduces some new characters who actually contribute to the show and Himeno's development, such as a classmate of her mother's, and Ximena Valdez, a Mexican girl who loves ceramics and was influenced by Himeno's mother's creations. It's pretty rare for anime to depict characters of other races and from different countries outside of America, so to see a genuine Mexican in an anime is pretty refreshing (The only other one I can think of was Michiko and Hatchin, and that came out in 2008. There could be more that I'm not aware of, though). I can't exactly comment on the authenticity of Ximena's portrayal, as I'm not Mexican or Latin-American, but Ximena is a far cry from a lot of the stereotyped depictions of Mexican women in mainstream media, like the seductive temptress, a criminal, or a put-upon immigrant from an impoverished background. Ximena is fairly cheerful and enthusiastic, is clearly passionate about her work, worked very hard to get to where she is because she truly loves studying ceramics and pottery, and actually has a good grasp on the Japanese language. The main characters all accept her with open arms and make no comment on her race or background whatsoever. It helps that the Spanish used in the show is accurate and doesn't sound like it came out of Google Translate.

One other thing Yakumo does well is that it doesn't try to rehash the same storylines as the first season, instead focusing on being much more character-driven and having more internal conflicts than the first. So you won't find them entering another ceramics contest at the end. But the show has always been about putting its characters first, even if most of them are still kind of tropey. That doesn't mean Yakumo doesn't have its moments of weirdness though. For some reason, one episode is completely dedicated to showing how Mika created the ceramic bird mascot of the series, and the show had the bright idea of giving the bird mascot a voice and internal thoughts. It's not as weird as that one episode of the first season, but it is a little jarring.

So all in all, Yakunara Mug Cup mo season 2 built upon what made the first season great, and while not reaching any new heights or anything, still managed to be very sweet and a good show overall.
 
Just finished this review today, and it'll be my last review of 2021.

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Rating: 77/100.

It's honestly kind of surprising. The 2010s have actually been a pretty amazing year for the Pokemon anime, and by that, I don't necessarily mean the TV anime starring Ash. It's no secret that Pokemon as a franchise has been going on for years, and it's popularity isn't going to wane anytime soon. But for years, for anyone who couldn't play the games, the TV anime was all we got, and it's made no secret of the fact that it's mainly aimed at children and has no interest in getting rid of Ash Ketchum anytime soon, even long after he overstayed his welcome. Then a slew of new Pokemon anime not centered on him got released into the wild, such as Pokemon Generations, Pokemon Twilight Wings, the PokeToon shorts, and this most recent offering, Pokemon Evolutions, which is basically a season 2 for Generations, or at the very least a different continuity for it, covering content from Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield, which didn't exist when Generations was made. Needless to say, Pokemon fans who wanted more out of the anime are very happy to have more options, even if those options are small compared to the TV anime's over 1000 episodes and counting. Fans were hyped for Evolutions, as was I, and...well, it does have moments where it shines, but many can attest that out of all the short Pokemon anime we've received, Evolutions stands as being the weakest.

That's not to say Evolutions is bad. Like Generations, it's basically an anthology of shorts depicting abridged versions of significant events that happened in the games, with each episode covering a different game and event. Unlike Generations, Evolutions goes backwards, starting from Sword/Shield and ending with Red/Blue (Or, in this case, the Let's Go games). Rather than spend paragraphs talking about the entire series as a whole, I'm going to talk about each episode individually, as each one has their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and the entire story doesn't have one singular narrative to comment on, with each episode being self-contained stories and all. There is one interesting thing to note though: Apparently, the animation was made to accommodate the English audio rather than the Japanese voices, with the entire music soundtrack done by not a Japanese composer, but by Abe Goldfarb, who makes the music for Pokemon's English dub. Not sure what prompted this idea, but I do like that Pokemon's trying to expand their repertoire like this.

The first episode, The Champion, focuses on Leon and his lingering feelings of guilt after the Eternatus incident. I like that this actually gave us some insight into Leon's state of mind after the encounter with Eternatus, and since the episode is very light on dialogue, it manages to convey Leon's feelings and guilt through his body language and the animation. Basically, show don't tell. But it does have the opposite problem of coming across as rather ambiguous in regards to what Leon could actually be thinking or feeling because it's so light on dialogue. I'm also not a fan of how overly muscular and bulky his design looks, especially the shape of his face and chin. He looks way too much like a bodybuilder who overdosed on steroids. On these aspects, I think Twilight Wings did them better. The second episode, The Eclipse, is honestly my favorite one and, in my honest opinion, the best episode, focusing entirely on Lillie and her progression from frightened shy girl to a more confident, self-assured person who doesn't have to let her mother's abuse rule her life. Not only are the character designs less bulky and much smoother compared to The Champion, it also shows us, in short snippets, Lillie's character development and how she became the person she does at the end of the Sun/Moon games. Combine this with great voice acting, luscious animation, and well-choreographed battles, and you have a feast for the eyes and ears. Also, I'm going to say this because I can: THANK FUCK THEY GAVE LILLIE AN ACTUALLY GOOD ENGLISH DUB VOICE FOR ONCE!!!

The third and fourth episodes, titled The Visionary and The Plan, are admittedly the two weakest episodes. I liked that they focused more on the villains and offered more insight to them, but in the case of Lysandre, Generations already covered his story, and this just felt like a rehash of it from different angles. Plus, the battle at the end was just Xerneas one-shotting his Mega Gyarados, because it's totally a good idea to pit a Dark/Water type against a Fairy type, riiiight? Plus, it didn't really show us anything that we didn't already know about Lysandre. The same goes for Ghetsis in The Plan. Poor N only got one line in that whole episode and that's it, and Ghetsis didn't sound menacing enough to me (I only saw it in English, so he might sound better in Japanese). Those two episodes felt more like rehashes than anything and didn't offer anything new.

Thankfully, episode five, The Rival, marks a return to form. Some people might have issues with this episode because of the static Pokemon battles, Barry's less emotive personality, and focusing more on his relationship with his father than with the player character, but I personally really liked it. It's refreshing to see Barry display other aspects of his character and be more contemplative than what we're used to, and I always appreciate it when creators try something new, even with established personalities for characters. Hey, if Pokemon Adventures can get away with it, I don't see why Pokemon Evolutions can't either. The next episode, The Wish, is also one of the weaker ones to me, because it has the same problem as episodes 3 and 4, in that it just shows us what we already know about Zinnia and the lore for Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire while only hinting at her backstory...and not letting the player character do anything besides walk around and shriek and survive falls from cliffs. If anything, The Wish would have been so much better had it delved more into Zinnia's backstory and explained who the original Aster was that she loved so much.

The seventh episode, The Show, is definitely one of the most creative ones, as it dives a lot deeper into the lore of the series and expands on its world, making it feel like a place that's actually lived in. It also has the neat idea of showing off the Kimono Girls performing a show and incorporating Pokemon attacks into it. It does suffer from some pretty glaring continuity issues in regards to the history behind the two Ecruteak towers, which Generations already covered, but that's really the only problem people had with it. Plus, it also has some cute comedic bits as well. I consider The Show to be my third favorite, just behind The Rival and The Eclipse. The final episode, The Discovery, achieves the perfect balance of being action-packed, funny, and heartwarming, and ends the anthology on a surprisingly sweet note.

Bottom line, Pokemon Evolutions is mainly focused on telling bite sized stories about the different Pokemon games, so the characters don't have a whole lot of depth to them unless you've played the game. If I had to name the most significant flaw Evolutions has, is that it's inconsistent. Some episodes do a great job of expanding on the characters and Pokemon world, while others just rehash plot points from the game and don't do anything new, and others have really glaring continuity mistakes. It tries to do what Generations did, but doesn't have the larger episode count the former has and often struggles with characterization and keeping with the basic lore of the series. That being said, I think the series works better if you consider it like a pseudo-sequel to Generations, since Evolutions is basically it but covering the generations the former didn't and having alternate takes on various events, like the Ecruteak towers. I still think Pokemon Generations is better, but I wouldn't entirely miss Evolutions, as it does have some good stuff to offer if you're willing to give it a chance.

And with that, this is my final review of 2021! Here's hoping 2022 will be even better for not just Pokemon, but for the entertainment industry in general.
 
Huh, I thought my Pokemon Evolutions review would be my last review of the year. Turns out I was wrong!

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Rating: 72/100.

Unlike most people in the anime fandom, I didn't really get into Mamoru Hosoda's movies until later. But he's certainly been making a name for himself over the past decade and a half. I first started out with Summer Wars, which I liked, and one of my college classes showed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which I thought was just okay. I also liked Wolf Children, haven't seen Boy and The Beast, and Mirai was okay but its concept doesn't really translate well considering the age of its protagonist. I did see the Digimon movies he directed once upon a time, albeit in the mercilessly censored American dub Digimon The Movie. But Hosoda's 2021 offering, Belle, promised to be his most ambitious movie yet. With character designs by famous Disney animator Jin Kim, and backgrounds done by Cartoon Saloon, the company that made movies such as Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers, there was a lot of buzz and a lot of hype. Having seen it though, this movie really tries, it really tried, but I think its ambition ultimately was its biggest undoing.

The story centers on a girl named Suzu, who is still reeling from her mother's death years ago. Her relationship with her father is strained, she isolates herself from her friends, and she can no longer engage in the one passion she has, singing, because it reminds her too much of her mother, who cultivated her love of singing, and thus, trying to sing makes her throw up. But a friend of hers tells her about a virtual computer world called U, where she can take on a customized avatar and be whoever and whatever she wants to be. Entranced, Suzu takes on the persona of a pink-haired songstress named Belle, whose singing is at first criticized and panned, but slowly becomes a viral sensation. But one of her online concerts is interrupted by a strange, monstrous beast avatar, simply called The Beast, who's infamous in U for being a troublemaker. But Belle find herself interested in the Beast and learning more about him.

The movie focuses mainly on two things: The world of U, where Belle gets to know the beast and finds herself being targeted by the administrators who want to kill him because of his shenanigans, and Suzu's life in the real world. Honestly, though, U itself is pretty much the source of the movie's biggest problems. How is U even supposed to work? Is it a deep dive simulation similar to VR, or is it like a console video game? Do the people who use U interact with it like you would in a VR game, or do they just sit at their computers? Nothing about U makes any sense at all, and the movie refuses to really go into how U really works, just treating it like a generic fantasy world and having things happen just because the plot demands it. Say what you will about Sword Art Online and all of its issues, but SAO at the very least established that the characters have to sleep and have headgear on to interact with everything within the video games they're playing, because the games in question are deep dive virtual reality games. Belle makes the case that U is a heavily futurized version of the internet, similar to what Summer Wars did with Oz, but because it has the characters connect with U via earbuds, it doesn't explain how the avatars are even supposed to work, or whether the people in real life are interacting with U's environment through their avatars or not. Even Summer Wars, as nonsensical as its premise could be at times, at the very least established that much! Also, U's app icon is literally just the Uber app icon. How lazy can you get? And the movie establishes that AIs apparently exist, but the AI characters in question are little more than the Beast's gatekeepers.

But the ridiculousness of U's setting isn't the only problem Belle has. There are times when the movie feels really bloated, like it's trying to do too much at once. We have Suzu's grief over her mother, the mystery of just who the Beast is in real life, U in and of itself, some romance shenanigans between some of Suzu's classmates, the Beast's eventual reveal, and so on. It feels like all of these things are constantly warring with one another, fighting for equal amounts of screen time, and as a result, they all feel half-baked, with the stuff in U suffering the most. The movie is two hours long, but it feels like it needed more time to flesh out all of its subplots and core concepts. This also results in a lot of really strange writing decisions, especially for the ending, that come across as way too cheesy and melodramatic for my liking, almost coming off like a half-baked Hallmark film. Seriously, Belle could have worked better had it cut out at least one or two of these subplots, and it'd be much more streamlined in the process. Finally, let's talk about Justin. He, along with U, is the biggest dark spot on this movie. What even is the point of this character? He's literally nothing more than a Saturday morning cartoon villain whose only purpose is to antagonize the characters for no reason, even though they're doing nothing but minding their own business. Did he really even need to exist? Justin feels like a villain shoved into the movie just for the sake of having a villain, when the movie could have worked so much better without him. He almost feels like a rip-off of Gaston shoved into a Buzz Lightyear costume, and the movie makes absolutely no effort to really develop him as a character beyond his misguided villainy. He serves no purpose other than to cause unnecessary conflict, and the whole movie would have been better off if he were cut out.

Alright, that's all the bad stuff. Now let's talk about the good stuff, starting with the usual things Hosoda excels at. Suzu's a decent protagonist who develops nicely throughout the movie, and many of the side characters were actually pretty fun and had genuinely well executed arcs of their own, even if they don't get to do much. I only wish we got to know more about Peggie Sue, one of the U singers who starts off shallow at first but then comes to support Suzu/Belle in her time of need. The animation done by Hosoda's Studio Chizu is still top notch, and the CGI, while not as fluid and textured as, say, Lupin The 1st and Dragon Quest: Your Story, is still fairly solid, and I like that Hosoda limited the CGI to just being used in U. The soundtrack is obviously a banger, as this is a movie very heavy on music, and I did genuinely like all the songs. It's clear that Hosoda and his team really tried to go all out for this one, but I don't think this movie was able to carry the weight of all that ambition it had, as it could have easily been better had it cut out a lot of the more extraneous subplots, expanded on certain characters and how they develop, and streamlined it more. And get rid of Justin. He was just pointless.

Sorry Hosoda-san. I really wanted to like this more than I did, and for what it's worth, Belle does have some genuinely good stuff going for it. But it suffers from being too ambitious for its own good, and becoming too bloated as a result.
 
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My first review of the new year! I attempted to write this on May 27th, 2016, but didn't finish it until a few days ago.

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Rating: 87/100

2005 was the year I began dipping my entire being into the anime and manga scene. I had discovered a whole world of stories and fantasies that were completely different from the Western cartoons I was watching growing up. I was amazed at how bold anime and manga could be, and devoured whatever I could watch or read. Among them, Wish was one of the manga that stuck with me the most. I remember blind-buying one of the volumes at a little convention called AnimeNEXT, and the final volume at MangaNEXT. I own all four volumes, and have had them for sixteen years, with no intention of getting rid of them any time soon. Even now, reading it still tugs at my heart, and the themes resonate with me unlike any other. I was only just starting to get into reading manga at the time, so I didn't own many back then. Over the years though, I wondered if Wish could still hold up. After I re-read it, my answer is yes, it still holds up wonderfully.

The story is very basic. Shuichiro Kudo, a 28-year-old doctor and bachelor, is perfectly happy with his life, though he doesn't look it. He's satisfied with his job, content with living alone, and has no need for unnecessary drama. One day, he finds a tiny angel stuck in a tree and saves her from being attacked by a crow. The angel, Kohaku, is grateful to him and wants to grant him a wish. But Shuichiro says he doesn't need any wishes to be granted, even though Kohaku begs to try and grant him a wish to express her gratitude. But the more Kohaku stays with him, the more Shuichiro winds up getting entangled in Heaven and Hell's affairs. Two angels, two devils, and two servant devils wind up living with him under mysterious circumstances, and Shuichiro and Kohaku learn that there are some wishes that cannot be fulfilled alone.

Clamp has been very famous for their beautiful artwork, especially when they first started out. After reading a lot of their manga, I can say that Wish's artwork is quite beautiful, even by 90s standards. I mean, what's there to say about Clamp that hasn't been said already? Everything is filled to the brim with elegance and dignity, from the way the angels and devils are designed, to the work that was put into the world the characters live in. The backgrounds are highly detailed, enough to make the world feel lived in, with good usage of shading and shadows when needed, and since the characters are adults, they're all deliberately designed to look like adults. Angels are drawn with lots of frills, the devils are drawn with sharp angles and darker color palettes, and so on. There is one thing that might make people raise their eyebrows though: In volume 2, there's a chapter where Kohaku sings, but the song isn't given any lyrics, and CLAMP makes use of a lot of imagery to convey its beauty, like Kohaku's wings, spheres of light, and birds commenting on how great the song is. Drawing characters singing and not having audio and music to back it up may come across as awkward for some.

It does help that all the characters are pretty likeable, with a wide variety of personalities that are different from those seen in modern anime/manga nowadays. Shuichiro is stoic and mature, behaving like any adult would, his grandfather becomes a prominent character, Koryu starts off as a little shit but gets better as the series goes on, etc. The cast has both idiots and smart people, brash people and calm people, and all of them bounce off of each other wonderfully. The manga is fairly short, only clocking in at four volumes, but that wound up being the perfect length to flesh the main cast out. It's a breeze to pick up and read through, and it has enough content to both flesh out the story and find time to let the characters breathe and develop, letting the audience get to know them better. That being said, the manga does have some side characters that are rather one-dimensional, rely heavily on their gimmick, or don't get utilized much. For example, there's a side story about a cat with a split personality that doesn't really go anywhere. But the main cast and their eclectic, fun personalities more than make up for this.

So yeah, while Wish isn't necessarily one of CLAMP's best manga, nor its most popular, it does have a lot of sentimental value to me. More so than the more obvious one people tend to think of, CardCaptor Sakura. Sometimes I often wonder how my descent into anime fandom would have turned out, had I not read Wish, or whether I would even go deeper into anime/manga at all. I remember being very disappointed that it never got a full anime adaptation, just an anime-style music video. Kohaku does appear in the anime Kobato, but it's been a long time since I've seen that (And I need to rectify that, as I like Kobato as well). If you're looking for a manga that's short, sweet, but no less poignant and meaningful, feel free to give Wish a try. It was one of several gateway manga for me. Maybe it can be one of yours.
 
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This review was written just a few days ago, and boy am I glad I discovered this!

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Rating: 92/100.

When I first started getting deeper into the anime/manga fandom as a whole, I hadn't quite refined my tastes. It wasn't until 2010-2011 when I discovered what genres I really gravitated to. I know I definitely gravitated towards the World Masterpiece Theater and their adaptations of classic Western kids novels like Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess, Little Women, Dog of Flanders, and so on. That inspired me to seek out the actual novels they were based on in question when I was in high school and college. There was one classic children's book that I noticed didn't get that treatment: Rebecca of SunnyBrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It's been years since I read the book, but I still own it, and I think it's just okay at best, but I like it well enough. The thing is, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm hasn't had very good luck when it came to being adapted for the screen. There are three movies made for it, none of which were faithful to the story in any way, with the 1938 one starring Shirley Temple being absolutely nothing like the original book at all. There was a short mini series that aired in England in 1978, but I can't find anything on that. So yeah, it hasn't had much success when it came to being adapted for film, and while I like other Western books more than Rebecca, I was saddened by the idea that this sweet book would probably never get anything resembling a faithful adaptation in any format. It didn't help that the WMT shut down in 2009 because of the fact that, as this article mentions, Japan lost interest in children's anime based on Western stories. Since Rebecca never got that treatment, and nobody cared for it years after its publication, I thought it was doomed to be forgotten and fade into obscurity.

OR WAS IT?!

By some miracle, somebody had the bright idea of turning Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm into a half-hour long anime short film that premiered in March 2020, alongside two other shorts, as part of the yearly Young Animators' Training Project. And thus, Rebecca, or The Chronicles of Rebecca, was born. I honestly had no idea this even existed until the day after Christmas, and I noticed on the Wikipedia article for the book that it had somehow gotten an anime short based on it. Needless to say, I tracked it down right away, and it turned out to be easier to find than I thought. Also, this short is friggin' awesome! It's just oozing with great animation and that World Masterpiece Theater charm I love so much. Whoever decided to take a chance on this and bring The Chronicles of Rebecca to life, I friggin' love you. After seeing it, I can wholeheartedly say that this might be the most faithful adaptation of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm yet, and the short doesn't even cover the entire story!

Now, you're probably wondering what this short film is even about. The short film is only half an hour long, only covering one part of the novel. Having read it, here's what the novel is generally about: Rebecca Randall is a fun-loving ten-year-old girl who lives with her large but impoverished family on a farm. When her father dies, life on the farm gets harder, and her mother can't handle raising so many children, so she sends Rebecca to live with her two aunts in the town of Riverboro, Maine. The aunts in question, Miranda and Jane Sawyer, are more interested in Rebecca's older sister Hannah, as she's good with housework, but Rebecca's mother still needs her help, so Rebecca is sent to live with them instead, so she can get an education and a better life. Rebecca gets along with Jane just fine, but Miranda is strict and uptight, put off by Rebecca's free-spirited, imaginative, but careless personality that's typical of any child her age. But Rebecca's unrelenting optimism breathes life into the people around her, making their days just a little better. A lot of this is just explained in narration at the very beginning of the short film, as being half an hour long, it can't exactly afford to adapt the entire novel. The producers seemed to realize this, as they made the very smart move of just adapting one event from the novel that occurs across three chapters.

And really, it's easy to see that this short was made by people who absolutely know what they're doing, because the results are just incredible. The animation is really smooth and full of bright colors that just pop right off the screen, from the detailed backgrounds that are true to the time period the story takes place in, to the slightly simplistic character designs that strike a perfect balance between being both cartoony and realistic, similar to stuff like Les Miserables Shoujo Cosette or Konnichiwa Anne. I also love the short's usage of lighting and weather when conveying mood and atmosphere, such as how a room lights up when Rebecca is happy or comes to an epiphany, or how dark, somber the dining room is when Miranda and Jane are having dinner after Rebecca is sent to her room, conveying the tense atmosphere between them. Even the usage of English writing is pretty on point, and I didn't notice any spelling mistakes or basic grammatical errors, which even some WMT shows are pretty guilty of at times. The soundtrack is also very pleasant too, relying heavily on violins, fiddles, and woodwind instruments that give the short a homey, country feel about it, again, similar to that of WMT shows like Konnichiwa Anne and Les Miserables. I will admit though, the ending song is kind of cheesy and a little too mealymouthed for my liking.

Of course, the cast of characters is where Rebecca really shines. Being a half hour long short, the creators knew they wouldn't be able to cover the entire story, so they chose to adapt just three chapters, all of them covering one significant event that occurs across those three chapters. Since the cast is kept relatively small, this leaves ample time for the producers to flesh them out and develop them within that half hour, and honestly, I think they pulled it off impeccably. Every character has their own unique sets of strengths, flaws, and weaknesses, and the short shows how they overcome them over the course of the short film, and even when the characters do things they shouldn't, whether it be because they were just careless or are blinded by bad events from the past, the short film is extremely careful not to portray either side as being completely 100% wrong or right. Both sides have valid points in the main conflict, and Rebecca acknowledges such, as the moral behind it is recognizing one's faults and amending them so you can grow as a person. Every character changes over the course of half an hour wonderfully: Rebecca learns to appreciate her situation and her own good qualities, Miranda learns to be less strict, more flexible, and to not let her own biases affect her judgment and relationship with Rebecca, and Jane learns to stand up for herself and call out her sister's callousness. It helps that the short film trusts its audience enough to not bash the message over their heads, letting the story convey the message organically, and never coming across as patronizing or condescending. Yes, it's a very simple story, and probably one that's been done before in many other places, but I've always held the philosophy that as long as you care about the product, actually put effort into it, and are passionate about it, you can make anything genuinely good. Seriously, this is what I wanted out of, say, something like Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, which refuses to actually flesh out its characters in any meaningful way in favor of zany comedy and needless filler that goes nowhere, and the few times it does try to flesh out its characters comes way too little, way too late for the audience to even care enough to invest in them anymore. It's really amazing how some anime seem to believe that boilerplate isekai, action, nude ladies, or flashy animation is a good substitute for substance, actual conflict, and characters that are relatable and interesting. Rebecca is able to achieve in half an hour what most shows nowadays that are 20-something episodes or longer just refuse to.

As far as its faithfulness to the book goes, having re-read the chapters in question, I think the short film's adaptation of them is pretty faithful, with the only deviation being at the very end. But for once, the changes make sense, given the short film's overall format, and the new material it puts in not only fleshes out the characters more, but ends the story on a very sweet, heartwarming note, I feel. It's inevitable that adaptations don't always adapt everything from their original source, and changes do get made in the transition from one medium to another. Some for the better, some for the worse, and any changes needed have to make sense (One example of a bad adaptation is M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which makes extremely basic mistakes in regards to the series' lore that cause huge plotholes and make the characters seem like complete idiots. The Nostalgia Critic's review of it elaborates on how terrible the changes that movie made are). I think the changes Rebecca did make manage to keep it fresh while staying true to the heart of both the story and the source material. If put in less qualified hands, Rebecca as a short probably wouldn't be as good as the final product we got, and frankly, I'm absolutely elated to see that Rebecca turned out the way it did. It's stuff like this that reminds me of why I love anime, and that there's hope for the anime industry yet. My only other gripe with Rebecca is that it's too damn short! I would kill for an entire series on Rebecca as a whole, and it's clear the people who worked on this really cared about bringing this story to life. I, and probably many others who are craving more stories similar to the stuff in the WMT, would absolutely devour a whole series based on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But since the anime industry doesn't really care much for stories like these anymore, I know that'll probably never happen. But for what it is, I'm happy that we at least got something like Rebecca at all, and I really hope the people who worked on this get to achieve great things in the future.

In short, The Chronicles of Rebecca is a sweet, heartwarming, truly enjoyable short film that deserves all the love in the world, and I'm glad Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm finally got a great, faithful adaptation for once.
 
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Just finished this review today, for one of my favorite anime ever.

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Rating: 94/100.

I first got into the anime scene in 2005, when I was 12 years old, but at that time, I hadn't gotten into the habit of finishing shows. I would just watch any episode of an anime I could find and that was it, often leaving them unfinished due to other obligations, like school or helping around the house. It wasn't until the early 2010s that I started getting into watching more anime and actually finishing them depending on what I was into at the time. Over time, I began to cultivate my tastes and figure out which anime I liked and which ones I didn't. I even gave some shows that I didn't think I'd like a chance, and I found some real diamonds in the rough. But there are some anime where people absolutely rave about them and get showered with nothing but positive reviews. One of those anime is Haibane Renmei, a show that, if you told my 12-year-old self I'd watch and consider one of my favorite anime ever, she'd probably call you crazy. I honestly wouldn't have touched something like this if not for a former blogger I followed praising it to high heaven. And honestly, I can totally see why he, and other people I know of, loved it. Not gonna lie, Haibane Renmei is one of my favorite anime of all time.

The premise goes as follows: In a mysterious, walled town called Glie, winged people known as Haibane co-exist among normal humans. Haibane are born from cocoons, wear halos, their grey wings are small and flightless, and are not allowed to leave Glie for any reason, as only the Federation is able to do that. One such Haibane, Rakka, is born in a decrepit boarding house called Old Home, inhabited by other female Haibane who help her out and teach her the ways of Glie. Every Haibane is expected to work in Glie and contribute, meet various people, and look inward until they learn to understand and accept themselves. But although Rakka is happy with her new life, she is constantly plagued with questions: What was her life like before she came to Glie? Does she even deserve to be here? Haibane Renmei focuses on her journey as she interacts with others and even helps them understand themselves.

One thing is to be made very clear: If you're looking for a fast-paced anime with high octane action, explosions, loud characters, and a grand, sprawling plot that gets bigger and bigger as it goes on, this is absolutely not the show for you. Haibane Renmei is very clearly meant to be a grounded, down-to-earth, spiritual slice-of-life story and a deep character study, where the characters learn the ins and outs of the town they live in, the rules it establishes, and the things they themselves learn from being in Glie. Plus, the anime restrains its scope to just one location, and does intentionally leave some things unexplained, such as what the walls exactly are, what the Federation really is, and some minor details, with the creator, Yoshitoshi Abe, going on record saying that he did that on purpose, so fans could conjure up their own theories and let their imaginations run wild. Basically, Haibane Renmei is a show that respects its audience, knows what it wants to be, and doesn't try to bite off more than it can chew (Take note, Sonny Boy).

With the story being so subdued and down-to-earth, the animation obviously reflects this. As far as animation goes, Haibane Renmei isn't the best looking show out there, with half of it just being still images of the characters talking, and half of it being basic movements like running or walking. But that doesn't necessarily mean its art style or animation is outright bad. The muted colors and washed out appearance give the anime a very rustic look, fitting for how old and antiquated the town of Glie and everything in it is. The backgrounds are all very well painted and well drawn, the characters have unique, grounded designs, and the anime makes great use of lighting and expressive composition, letting the animation say more than the characters themselves do on occasion. But you're not going to find super bright colors that pop right off the screen. The soundtrack is also very subdued but fitting for the show's atmosphere and themes, with heavy usage of soft piano pieces, religious-sounding chamber music, and even...low-key accordions? But the soundtrack strikes a good balance between being both whimsical and somber when the atmosphere calls for it, and some BGMs sound like straight-up 8-bit music you'd find on an NES game. Not even kidding.

But the real heart and soul of the series is the cast of characters. Now, because the anime deliberately refuses to go deep into their backstories, viewers will probably find them dull at first. But over the course of 13 episodes, viewers gradually get to know each character, their strengths, flaws, skillsets, and how they go about their day and interact with the world around them, and none of them really fit neatly into the typical anime archetypes. The characters of Haibane Renmei all feel like people you'd meet on the street, and their struggles and growth are all portrayed with earnest realism. This is an anime that takes nothing for granted, especially in regards to the main two characters, Rakka and Reki, who grow and change throughout the show, and the anime really goes out of its way to make you care about them. I don't expect every single character in a medium to have layers upon layers of depth, just enough to make me want to care about them and root for them, even as they go about their daily lives and work to come to terms with their own issues, and in my opinion, Haibane Renmei absolutely hit a home run with its ensemble.

Honestly, I can't really think of any real flaws that Haibane Renmei as a show has. I have no issue with certain aspects being left unexplained, as Haibane Renmei focused only on the things that mattered and delivered on those aspects. I had no problem with the slice-of-life parts, as even though they're not as deep and emotional as the series' second half, I thought they served their purpose well and actually made me care about the Haibane and the world they live in. But I can definitely see people getting bored with the series' slow pace, religious themes, refusal to answer questions, and lack of action. I know I probably would have, had I seen it when I was a younger kid. Or put off by the gory presentation of Rakka's wings growing out in the first episode, but that's the only bloody scene in the entire show, and nothing else like that happens afterward. Fans of the series have conjured up all kinds of theories as to what the Haibane are, what the town is, and so on, and while I don't mind letting my imagination run wild in regards to the show's lingering mysteries, I'm still perfectly satisfied with Haibane Renmei as is. Seriously, it says a lot that most anime nowadays think boiler-plate isekai, over-the-top non-stop action, non-stop nudity, and power fantasies are a good substitute for actual substance, conflict, and interesting and relatable characters that you can actually care about.

All in all, Haibane Renmei is an amazing anime that absolutely deserves its status as a revered classic, and there is no excuse for you to not check it out.
 
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Just finished this review today!

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Rating: 81/100.

(This is my 450th completed anime!)

Man, who would have thought that 2022 would have two anime movies based on singing coming out in the US at the same time? The only reasons I even learned about Sing a Bit of Harmony's existence were that, 1. I lurk on Anime News Network every single day, and 2. Some idiot on the forum thread for the original announcement took issue with FUNimation co-producing it, and was like "Ewww, FUNi's co-producing it?! Anime's ruined forever! The character designs are so conservative and FUNi's obviously gonna shove their Western SJW agenda/politics into it!!"...even though the movie hadn't even come out yet, and it barely even had a plot summary at that time. I know, right? Anyway, I found out that this, along with Mamoru Hosoda's newest movie Belle, were being screened in the US around the same time. I couldn't see Belle's English dub, as it wasn't screening in my area, and any showtimes the dub had weren't outside work hours. Sing a Bit of Harmony, on the other hand, was screening outside my work hours, and the theater it was showing in, while not too close to me, was within a reasonable distance. I wound up choosing this over Belle, because I was able to see the latter online and, in case you didn't see my review of it, well...I thought Belle was just okay. It had good ideas, but it suffered from being too ambitious and having a lot of convoluted subplots that it didn't try to resolve in a coherent manner. So...nobody's gonna lynch me if I say I think Sing a Bit of Harmony is the better film of the two, right? Don't kill me!

Long story short, I actually really liked this one. So what's the story, you might ask? In a futuristic world where robots and artificial intelligence are commonplace, a young high school girl, Satomi Amano, has resigned herself to living her life alone and friendless. Due to an incident not too long ago, the student body isn't very fond of her, and Satomi thinks it's better this way. One day, a transfer student named Shion comes into her class...and she seems to know Satomi, making it her mission to make her happy. Shion proves to be...kind of insane, preferring to loudly serenade in public like she's in a Disney musical. Satomi and a few of her classmates find out that Shion is actually an advanced AI robot made to look human, and her existence must be kept secret because she's actually a part of Satomi's mom's big project that absolutely cannot be revealed to the public yet. But that's easier said than done, considering that Shion is...well, a very chipper AI with no concept of personal boundaries and is hilariously bad at fitting into human society.

So...to put it simply, this movie is one part very self-aware Disney musical (I'm not even kidding), one part high school story about teenagers resolving their issues, and one part sci-fi romp. Apparently, the director, Yasuhiro Yoshiura, is very fond of making sci-fi movies. I admit I'm not familiar with his body of work, but after seeing Sing a Bit of Harmony, I think I want to now, because this movie was actually a lot of fun, if rather cheesy at times. For one, I really liked the animation. Again, I'm not familiar with Yoshiura's body of work, so I can't really compare this to his other movies, but from what I did see, I thought the animation was very nice and smooth. Character movement was fluid, the world the characters lived in actually felt like a slightly more futuristic version of ours without going too over-the-top, and it really made good use of bright colors, flashy light shows, and CGI when it mattered.

When I say the movie feels like a very self-aware Disney musical, I mean it. Shion often breaks out into songs, many of which feel very, VERY cheesy, similar to stuff you'd find in Disney movies like Moana, The Little Mermaid, or, more recently, Encanto. It does help that the movie gets a lot of comedy from it, and the characters react believably to her ridiculous actions (Mainly annoyance, like any teenager would). It almost reminds me of that one movie Disney made called Enchanted, what with how Shion acts like the princess in that while everybody around her is like the New York citizens who are put off by her simplistic naivete. It does help that the movie is very aware of its cheesiness and embraces it, and even manages to get some really cute, character-driven comedy out of it at times. And need I mention the awesome soundtrack? Both the background music and the songs are absolute bangers. Also, I saw the English dub of this, and FUNimation really went all out in dubbing every single song, including the end credits! I kind of hope the eventual home video release comes with a soundtrack CD with all the dubbed songs just so I can hear Megan Shipman (voice of Shion) belting her heart out, because she absolutely NAILED all of the cheesy, Disney-style songs here.

But you can't have a movie without good characters to back it up, and I think the movie did succeed on this front, especially in regards to the main cast. All of them had good chemistry, and while anyone who's not Shion, Satomi, or Toma didn't get as much depth as they could have gotten, they fulfilled their roles nicely. I also very much appreciated that Satomi's mother got a good deal of spotlight and was able to help the kids out during the final act of the movie. Yay, responsible adults actually helping with the plot! There needs to be more of that in anime. I kind of wish Aya could have done more, though. I mean, I like the subplot she had with Gotchan and how the movie didn't try to make her out to be some cliche snooty alpha bitch character, but the later parts of the movie imply she doesn't have the best relationship with her father, but nothing is done with it beyond an easy-to-miss throwaway line that's quickly forgotten about. But I do appreciate the material she did get and how the movie executed it. But I can see people taking issues with Shion's overly cheerful, saccharine nature, even though her behavior makes sense in the context of the movie, as she's an AI with a very simplistic worldview. I actually found her just fine as a character, as I've seen other portrayals of characters like her to be far worse. I also thought Satomi as a character is fine too, and I like what they did with her here. I also love that Sing a Bit of Harmony used an in-universe Disney knock-off movie as a really important plot point.

Of course, Sing a Bit of Harmony isn't a perfect movie by any means. For one, the story is pretty predictable and cliche, especially during the high school parts, and any person who's well-versed in stories like this in any medium can see all the tropes and story beats from a mile away. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as I liked how Sing a Bit of Harmony used them here, but this movie has no intention of breaking any boundaries. Secondly, I saw this with my dad, and he liked the movie, though felt a lot of the story seemed too farfetched. I can see where he's coming from, and I can imagine others feeling the same way. I personally had no problem with it, as I felt the movie made good use of its more restrained scope and didn't try to risk being more ambitious. One thing this movie has over Belle is that Sing a Bit of Harmony knew what it wanted to be, kept its focus, and didn't try to bite off more than it could chew, whereas Belle tried to stuff too many elements into one movie and all of them came out rather half-baked as a result. However, the two movies do share one big flaw: A one-note, stereotypical villain character who's just there to be an adversary for the main characters to deal with. To be fair, Sing a Bit of Harmony's villain feels better integrated into the movie's plot, and his motives and purpose actually make some degree of sense, but my problem with him is that he reeks of "idealistic children bad, evil adult society rules!" from his character design all the way down to his dialogue. Thankfully, unlike Justin from Belle, this villain gets far less screen time and barely has much impact on the plot.

So yeah, I'm glad I got to see this. Sing a Bit of Harmony isn't going to bring the house down, but in these trying times, sweet, low-key, wholesome movies like this are a much needed balm, and this movie really appeals to my inner ten-year-old. And now I shall eagerly await the eventual home video release.
 
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Yay, I'm finally done with this damn series! I banged out this review last week as I was so impatient to get this done.

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Rating: 60/100.

After being away from Pretty Cure for a few years, I watched Healin Good Pretty Cure on a whim, and it wound up being the best decision I made. Seriously, I've made no secret of the fact that Healin Good Pretty Cure is one of my favorite seasons of Pretty Cure. Other than not utilizing all of its villains except for Daruizen enough and having to cut episodes due to delays from the pandemic, Healin Good Pretty Cure, I feel, did pretty much everything right in terms of what I feel a magical girl series should be, something I hadn't felt since Heartcatch or Go Princess. So when the series after that, Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure was announced, I decided to watch it. But something told me that it wasn't going to hold a candle to Healin Good in my eyes, but at the same time, I didn't want to be that person and just judge it solely because it wasn't Healin Good. But dear lord...even with my low expectations, Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure has to be one of the biggest disappointments and letdowns I've seen in a while.

So what's the story? A chipper young girl, Manatsu, moves to mainland Japan to start middle school, as her home island doesn't have a middle school. While preparing for the trip, she meets a real life mermaid, named Laura, who had to flee to the surface because her underwater kingdom was attacked, and she's been tasked to find four warriors, Pretty Cure, who can defeat the evil witch that decimated her home. Manatsu is more than happy to accept the task, and three more girls, Sango, Minori, and Asuka, join them on their quest. Together, they must fight the witch's minions and stop them from stealing Motivation Power from their family, friends, and the rest of the townspeople...but they're not quite sure just what the Witch of Delays even wants with Motivation Power in the first place. And yes, the premise is exactly as stupid as it sounds. I'm not even kidding. This leads me to the first of Tropical Rouge's biggest issues: There's literally no stakes or conflict! All the villains ever do is turn people into monsters by sucking away their motivation, which doesn't even kill them BTW, and as a result, there's no palpable tension or sense of urgency, and the battles feel less like high stakes action and are about as boring as eating lunch. Plus, the three minions who serve the Witch of Delays are solely defined by being lazy, and never even fight the Pretty Cure themselves! Even Mahou Tsukai's villains, as bad and cliche as they were, did more than just lie around and steal energy from people.

But the lack of a compelling storyline and bland villains aren't the only thing wrong with Tropical Rouge. Secondly, the show's themes feel really bizarre: How exactly are motivation, procrastination, and cosmetics supposed to go together? How does makeup contribute to motivation? I know effort goes into applying it, or that in some cases it can boost your confidence, but...I don't know. The themes don't seem to mix very well here. Manatsu, the main character, says she uses makeup to deal with loneliness and uneasiness in a new place, but honestly, makeup and cosmetics feel really out of place in a situation like that unless you're deliberately trying to get people to notice you. It feels like TroPri just threw its themes together in a blender just for the sake of it without taking into account whether the contents would actually mix well enough or not. I know Pretty Cure is mainly a glorified toy commercial, and I have no problem with that, but there are lots of times when it felt like TroPri really wanted to hammer in the fact that they were selling toys to kids in the audience, even though they used more subtle methods of introducing them in previous iterations.

Plus, you'd think with 40-something episodes, Toei would use that time to flesh out the characters at every opportunity, build on their chemistry, and make the audience actually care about them, right? WRONG! Previous Pretty Cure seasons would flesh out their main characters early on, showing us their strengths, weaknesses, personalities, idiosyncracies, and reasons for becoming Pretty Cure. Heartcatch Pretty Cure welt full hog on this as early as episode 4. Healin Good had Nodoka's reasons for wanting to be a Pretty Cure established in episode 2. Smile Pretty Cure eschewed its narrative in favor of developing its main ensemble, and while it didn't always succeed, the creators' hearts were in the right place. Do you want to know how long it takes for Tropical Rouge to put the spotlight on any character that's not Manatsu or Laura? EPISODE 28, more than halfway into the series' run! The entire first half of the series is little more than comedic filler used to pad things out unnecessarily, and it often felt to me like the show actively refused to develop any of its main characters, or even flesh them out in ways that made them feel more like people and less like over-the-top stereotypes. Sango in particular is the biggest victim of this, because episode 3 established a character flaw she has, that she's a conformist who's afraid of going against the in-crowd, and Toei could have done a lot with that, since there's a lot of people who can relate to that. But instead, said flaw never comes up again, and she only ever gets a grand total of TWO focus episodes, both of which are extremely late into the series' run, and even then, they barely do anything with her, so she's literally nothing more than living background scenery taking up space! And I say this as someone who really likes Sango, and I wish she had gotten to do more! She deserves better! Minori and Asuka are more fleshed out, thankfully, and out of the five Cures, Asuka is actually the most well developed and three-dimensional, as she got the best material in the show.

Basically, Toei basically put off developing the other Cures in favor of shilling Manatsu and Laura to no end. Now, I want to say that I actually don't hate Laura as a character. I agree that she's become a bit of a spotlight hog since she became a Cure (That's not even a spoiler, BTW. She turns into a Cure in episode 17, which is really early by Precure standards), but I think she's fine, and I feel she earned the right to become a Cure. Plus, she doesn't annoy me NEARLY as much as, say, Haa-chan from Mahou Tsukai. But this isn't exactly an issue Toei is unfamiliar with, as their tendency to shill one character at the expense of others who really need more screentime has been prevalent as far back as Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart. Honestly, I think the biggest offender here is Manatsu, who's...just bland as hell. She's literally nothing more than a zany, loud, overly cheerful cipher who acts like she's high on sugar and is just there to shout "tropica-shine!!" every chance she gets. Now, I do admit I know I throw a lot of shade at Megumi from Happiness Charge Pretty Cure, and made it clear she's not my favorite character in Precure in general. But I am, however, going to give her credit for one thing: For as overly saccharine and annoying as Megumi could be, the staff on that show at least allowed her to show emotions other than over-the-top happiness and allowed her to have moments where she could be sad, vulnerable, jealous, angry, and insecure. Granted, other seasons did it better, but I am willing to give Happiness Charge credit where it due when it matters, because if you have a character behave one way all the time, the audience isn't going to connect with them. Manatsu doesn't get that. My problem with Manatsu is that, after 30-something episodes, she hasn't shown any emotions other than being over-the-top happy and zany, constantly shouting "Tropica-shine!" all the damn time, and the few times she acts anything but happy is played for laughs. There's literally nothing in-between! Manatsu is often way too happy for no reason whatsoever. Happiness should be spontaneous, not granted or forced. She's not allowed to be vulnerable or even act like a normal human being, which annoys the shit out of me, and the one episode that actually tried to address that issue shoots itself in the foot due to bad writing that made the characters seem needlessly dumb, and still played Manatsu's angst for laughs and not even trying to treat it like a genuinely serious situation! Furthermore, early in the show, Manatsu says she puts on makeup to deal with loneliness and uneasiness, but the show never actually SHOWS Manatsu being any of those things. 99% of the time, she's zany, loud, and acts like an overgrown five-year-old, and very rarely is she allowed to be vulnerable or realistically emotional in any way, so the anime kind of shoots itself in the foot when it can't even be bothered to develop any of its characters beyond their most basic personality trait.

Which leads me to the show's biggest problem: The fact that it's so laser-focused on comedy in favor of everything else. It always felt to me like Tropical Rouge has this mindset that if it can have characters act zany and make funny faces all the time, it won't lose the kids' attention, and considering how much it put off actually bothering to flesh out the story and the characters in favor of it, it comes off as patronizing and condescending at best. Here's the thing: I can understand Toei wanting to make a more lighthearted, comedic series after the more emotionally charged Healin Good, especially since we're still dealing with the COVID pandemic. Hell, the whole reason Smile Pretty Cure was created was so kids can be cheered up after the awful 2011 earthquake. But here's the thing: Smile also had a heavy focus on comedy, but it actually gave a shit about developing the characters and giving the audience reasons to care about them. Yes, it was very episodic and had a lot of filler, but Smile knew what to focus on and what to keep limited, keeping the comedic parts where it was appropriate, and allowing its characters to be vulnerable when it mattered. Smile didn't always succeed, but it at least tried. Smile didn't focus so much on comedy that it was at the expense of literally everything else, which is, unfortunately, what Tropical Rouge did. Most of the early episodes consist of Manatsu and Laura doing stuff that did nothing to progress the story, feeling more like they were just padding things out, and by the time the show remembered it needed to flesh out Sango, Minori, and Asuka, it was too little, too late, and I was no longer invested in the anime anymore. Seriously, Toei, your shows work better when you actually put effort into the writing and characters! Even Digimon Ghost Game, which is airing right now, understands this!

Alright, I think that's enough of the bad stuff. Let's talk about the good stuff. First: the animation. Everything is bright and colorful, with CGI being used when appropriate, the girls' Cure designs are actually pretty creative and fit the tropical theme the show is going for, and the actual character animation is fairly solid. The soundtrack is pretty good too, and, surprisingly enough, Toei actually held back on reusing BGM from Healin Good here. I only noticed two pieces of background music from Healin Good being used, though I could be wrong, so good on Toei for putting in some effort there. The songs are well sung too, with the opening being a total ear worm. I also liked a lot of the minor and side characters who appeared from time to time, like Manatsu's teacher Sakuragawa, Asuka's former friend-turned-rival Yuriko (the blue haired student council president), Sango's mom, that blue haired girl who loves astronomy, and so on. I also appreciate that Kururun isn't a living plot device or important to the story for once, as she's just a cute animal mascot, but still manages to be useful when the time calls for it. Also, I love that one episode that was just a bunch of vignettes done in different animation styles, and that was the absolute best justification to have the Heartcatch Pretty Cure girls make a cameo for a few scenes. The show does have some flashes of brilliance every now and again. Unfortunately, they're very few and far between, and not enough to save the show from being anything above aggressively mediocre.

Before anyone says anything, no, I don't expect children's shows to be on the level of Van Gogh-style masterpieces, nor am I one of those chuds who only like dark, edgy magical girl shows. Pretty Cure, at the end of the day, is a glorified toy commercial for little girls. But shows like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Ojamajo Doremi, Card Captor Sakura, and even other seasons of Pretty Cure, have proven that you don't have to be completely soulless when making them. All I ask is that the people who make these shows actually care and put effort into making said shows for girls, not simply My Little Pony Newborn Cuties-style visual fodder to plop kids in front of the TV so they can be babysat for half an hour every day. Every Pretty Cure season has things they're good at and some things they aren't. Mahou Tsukai took great care to flesh out its setting, Suite Pretty Cure made great use of its music themes, Smile Pretty Cure could be genuinely funny when it tried, Heartcatch really ramped up the action scenes and developed its main ensemble, and so on. Other than improved animation, Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure doesn't really have anything that makes it stand out from the other Pretty Cure seasons, or anything that it's really good at. It's a shame, because had it done more with itself, it could have been amazing, had it not tried so hard to be solely driven by comedy, filler episodes, and unnecessary shilling of both Manatsu and Laura. Granted, I still think Happiness Charge Pretty Cure is worse due to trying too hard to emulate other seasons, ignoring plot points it established, bad writing decisions, and poorly executed characters, so for the few things Tropical Rouge did do right, I'm willing to give it some credit where its due.

That being said, if you want something to show your daughter or little sister so they, or you, can kill time or have a good laugh, feel free to watch Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure. But it is absolutely NOT one of the better Pretty Cure seasons by a country mile. It wastes its time on needless filler and is just a massive chore to watch. I really hope Delicious Party Pretty Cure turns out better, and if it's not, I'm just gonna rewatch Heartcatch. Don't expect anything extraordinary out of this one.
 
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Oh yay, another crappy series I finished. This review was just done today.

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Rating: 48/100.

If you're one of those people who really likes to study the nitty-gritty of animation, like key animators or in-between animators, you've probably come across the name Mitsuo Iso. Mitsuo Iso is an animator who started out working for Studio Ghibli as a key animator (The process of which is explained in GKids' twitter thread here). Iso worked on various animation cuts for Only Yesterday, Ocean Waves, Porco Rosso, Perfect Blue, and even some fights in the End of Evangelion movie. He even did animation for the very first Digimon movie! In 2007, he created his own original anime called Dennou Coil which, while not necessarily a mainstream hit, is considered an underrated masterpiece. I haven't seen Dennou Coil, but I plan to one of these days (HIDIVE, why'd you have to take it off?!). But after Dennou Coil, Mitsuo Iso didn't try to make other projects since then, as apparently even back in 2007, corporations were apprehensive about creating completely original anime, especially anything not based on an existing source like a manga or light novel. But just this year, Iso made a comeback with a very ambitious set of movies called Orbital Children, which just dropped on Netflix. Fans of his work were excited, and since I found it was only going to be six episodes, I figured this would be a good time killer. I'm not normally into heavy sci-fi stuff, especially if they're filled with a lot of technobabble that flies right over my head (Keep in mind, I'm a 28-year-old woman), but I'm a sucker for good animation and well-developed characters, and Iso apparently did both with Dennou Coil, so maybe Orbital Children would turn out great!

...Yeah, I have words for this. In case you couldn't tell, I didn't like Orbital Children. And I really wanted to like it! It even had a great start! In the year 2045, space travel, AI, and technological advancements are commonplace, and the most recent scientific marvel are children born on the moon, though their lifespan is shortened due to some snags. One day, a group of kids win a contest and get to go to a space settlement to meet the children born on the moon. Unfortunately, a rogue comet hits the settlement, trapping them in space. Although the kids don't quite get along at first due to Touya's insufferable nihilism about humanity, they're going to have to work together if they even have a sliver of a chance of surviving. But this is really an oversimplification of things...mainly because one of Orbital Children's biggest flaws is that it tries to tell a really, really huge story in the span of just six episodes, and it really doesn't work. For one, technobabble and exposition is just dumped on you in literally every single episode, almost non-stop, giving you very little time to even process one concept it introduces before moving on to the next one within two seconds. And this series has a LOT of ideas: Intergalactic terrorist groups, AI comets, moon children, some mystical space prophecy, AI drones, the list goes on! There's just so much this show covers in the span of six episodes, and because they're just thrown at us at a breakneck pace, they're all unable to be really fleshed out, and I couldn't have cared less about them because the show would rather overload my brain with all the concepts and ideas it throws into a blender. Episode 4 in particular is guilty of this, as it just throws concepts at you over, and over, and over, with seemingly no end in sight, making it a real slog to go through!

But surely the characters can carry a story like this, right? Well...sort of, at first. Honestly, none of the characters other than Touya get fleshed out beyond one basic character trait they have. Mina in particular is just a social media obsessed teen who's way more focused on getting clout than, y'know, actually giving a shit about her situation, even as she gets locked in a space chamber and nearly dies from lack of oxygen! She does make for great comic relief and has some great funny faces, but that's really all she's good for. None of the other characters have much to their name, and even one of the villains who gets revealed later doesn't do much other than spout a bunch of philosophical babble about some space prophecy she's obsessed with. Konoha is little more than the wise, sickly waif who's there to spout philosophical rhetoric before possibly dying beautifully, and the adults don't do much except worry about the kids. To be fair, I actually did like Touya's progression through the series. He starts off as an insufferable, edgy misanthrope who believes Earth-born humans are inferior to moon people and that they should all die, but changes his worldview throughout the series and becomes nicer at the end. Though I wouldn't blame anyone for dropping the show because of him alone.

True to form, the animation is definitely the highlight of Orbital Children, with bright colors, detailed backgrounds, well-integrated CGI, and fluid movement typical of Iso's pedigree. The OST is nice too, if not very memorable. However, other than those two things, and Touya's development, everything else about Orbital Children is a mess. Like I mentioned before, the story is supposedly about space kids overcoming disasters and getting back home to Earth, but most of the meat in this show is taking up by overly pretentious technobabble and philosophical waxing that doesn't get utilized beyond blatant plot conveniences and Deus Ex Machinas to get out of whatever corners the writers wrote themselves into. We never get a sense of what the characters are like beyond their immediate situations because the show refuses to explore them in favor of, yet again, pretentious science and philosophy that's only shoved in there to make the series seem deeper than it actually isn't. Say what you will about something like, say, Astra: Lost In Space, but I feel that show did a better job of telling the story about kids trapped in space and trying to get back to Earth, because it knew to keep that as the focus, and gave a shit about fleshing out its characters, even if it didn't always succeed. Basically, Orbital Children bit off way more than it could chew and suffered as a result.

Also, one another thing: Episode 5, did you SERIOUSLY feel the need to shove in a scene where a child accidentally gropes an older woman's boob?! And right in the middle of what's supposed to be a tense, suspenseful scene, at that?! Whose idea was it to throw that in there?! Because shoehorning horny comedy into a serious scene does not fucking work!! It did nothing to further the story, completely broke the tension, and was absolutely unnecessary! It's almost like someone felt scared that nobody would give Orbital Children the time of day unless they put in one scene of a woman's boobs getting grabbed! "Hurr durr, nobody's gonna like this on its own merits, so let's throw in a kid groping an older woman! Heehee, that'll bring in viewers!" IT WILL NOT!! You could cut out that scene and absolutely nothing would be lost! If anything, it'd make the entire episode better because there wouldn't be out-of-place horny humor to kill the tension in what's supposed to be a very serious, tense sequence of kids about to die out in space!! Seriously, why is this even a trend?! The whole boob groping gag needs to fucking die forever!!

Okay, that's enough of my angry soapbox. Sorry Mitsuo Iso, I really wanted to like this, and you've made a lot of great things. But Orbital Children is not one of them. Had it cut out a bunch of the useless technobabble and pretentious philosophical bullshit and focused on maybe one or two of the concepts it introduced, it would have been much better. I wanted to care about these dumbass kids and root for them, but I just couldn't. There are reasons why I normally don't gravitate towards hard sci-fi anime, and Orbital Children was definitely a reminder of that. If you like Orbital Children, cool, more power to you, and if the show being on Netflix will get Iso more attention, or even allow him to make more original anime, that's great! Iso has gone on record saying that he had to fight tooth and nail just to get Dennou Coil created, and I'll always have respect for creative people who will fight to the death to make sure their creations are not only made, but seen, even in an incomplete form, no matter what obstacles they had to face and compromises they had to make. We all know what happened with Stars Align. But as far as original projects go, Orbital Children is absolutely not the best Iso has to offer, and probably wasn't the best way for me to get introduced to his directorial work.

If you like hard sci-fi, feel free to check it out, but if you're not into lots of exposition dumps, philosophical ramblings, and over-the-top sci-fi that overloads you're brain, give it a miss.
 
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Rating: 76/100.

Clannad is one of those anime that just hit at the right place at the right time. Not only was it adapted from a famous, beloved visual novel, a fairly new production company at the time, Kyoto Animation, really made an effort to do it justice by adapting it into an anime series that bordered on having 50 episodes. Then again, by that time, KyoAni already had experience adapting the works of Visual Arts/Key into animation previously, though they actually weren't the only ones doing so. For some reason, Toei got in on it as well, though their direction was to adapt them into movies (In the case of Kanon, they made that into a 13-episode series). KyoAni stopped adapting Key's visual novels into animation after Clannad, something that didn't sit well with their fans at the time (Man, remember when JC Staff was first revealed to be making the Little Busters anime? I remember the backlash being sooooo overblown). But Toei's adaptations of Key's work had their merits, mainly making them into more bite-sized for anyone who didn't want to watch 20-50 something episodes of KyoAni's TV versions. Having seen both the Clannad TV anime and the movie, I do feel that the movie is the inferior version, but I also don't feel it should be completely overlooked.

Fans of Visual Arts/Key will already know the story, but for the uninitiated, here's a general synopsis: Tomoya Okazaki is a delinquent who goes through life in a daze, with no ambitions in life, detached from everything, and weighed down by his own personal demons. Every night, he has a strange dream that he can't explain. When he meets a young woman, Nagisa Furukawa, who asks for his help, Tomoya is at first reluctant, but humors her, as he doesn't have much to do. But the two find themselves interacting more and more, and through a series of encounters and events, they gradually become friends. Nagisa wants to start up the drama club to put on an original play, and Tomoya, along with his slacker friend Youhei Sunohara, decide to join and help her out. But Tomoya's decision to help her out becomes something far more than even he and Nagisa could have ever imagined, enriching his life.

If you're hoping the movie will be exactly like both the visual novel or the anime, you're in the wrong place. Being a movie, it can't possibly adapt the entire source material, so changes do have to be made in order to adapt it to a different medium. For one, the focus is entirely on both Tomoya and Nagisa, with characters like Kyo and Tomoyo reduced to just friends. Kotomi only gets a cameo in one scene, and characters such as Fuuko and Ryo are left out entirely. But other characters get their roles expanded, such as Kouko, who becomes the drama club adviser instead of the elderly man who does so in the game and the anime...though as much as I like Kouko being more of a stern badass than she was in the anime, did they really have to pull the whole making her move so fast that she disappears into lines like she's in some Dragonball Z show? That just felt lazy to me. Also, whose idea was it to throw in a really random scene where Sunohara urinates on-screen? That was just unnecessary. Plus, with the movie's length, it doesn't have time to flesh out any character that's not Tomoya or Nagisa. But I'll give the movie credit for knowing what to focus on and what to keep limited, as it kept the focus on what was important, leaving out subplots that would have made the movie feel bloated. It helps that the major side characters, such as Tomoyo, Sunohara, Kyo, and Nagisa's parents, do get plenty of screen time on their own, and they get just enough time devoted to them that they don't feel like one-dimensional cardboard cut outs, even taking into account their different roles and execution compared to the TV anime. Basically, the side characters do a great job supporting the main storyline without overtaking it.

As far as animation goes, the Clannad movie is obviously inferior to KyoAni's take on it, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. For one, the character designs are true to the game, and while the animation isn't as dynamic or fluid as that of the TV series, it still gets the job done. Plus, there's something else to consider: This would be the final film directed by one of anime's most famous revolutionaries, Osamu Dezaki, who made a lot of great things during his heyday. He directed famous anime like Rose of Versailles, Treasure Island, Nobody's Boy Remi, Ashita no Joe, Oniisama e, and various Lupin III specials, among many other things. He even did some animation work for, of all things, Rainbow Brite. He started up and refined a lot of cost-cutting animation techniques, such as split screens (And the Clannad movie has A LOT of them), filters, repetition of scenes—stretching them out for dramatic effect, and, one that Dezaki fans will definitely recognize, stark, heavily lined watercolor paintings to close out scenes, or enhance them for further dramatic effect. His directing style definitely won't be for everyone, and his character designs are very much unlike most anime you see nowadays. I don't have as much to say on the soundtrack, as half of it is original stuff that I barely paid attention to, and half of it is music reused from the visual novel. Both are good and fit the tone of the story very well, but that's really about it.

Going back to the characters, Tomoya and Nagisa's roles are very much reversed in the movie. Nagisa is much more assertive and confident than she is in the show, and while the change in personality does make her feel a lot less overly cutesy and moe, I felt like the movie version stripped away the more realistic character flaws that made her more three-dimensional and dynamic in the TV anime. Tomoya suffered the most, as he's a lot more angsty and brooding, often staying that way for 90% of his screentime, even those his reasons for being so are valid (Mostly, barring the dream sequences which are nothing like the anime or visual novel). Because the movie took away some of his other personality traits in favor of ramping up his angst, he loses a lot of depth and character that he had in both the visual novel and the anime, which is a shame because he's the main character!

So yeah, don't go into this expecting it to be slavishly faithful to the original source. Clannad The Movie is very much its own entity trying to stand on its own and it needed to make do with what it had in order to tell the story it needed to within its limitations. For what it is though, I like to think of it as a bite-sized version of Clannad that's perfect for people who don't want to or are unable to commit to watching the 50-episode anime. It's not the absolute best adaptation of Clannad there is, but it does have its merits, so I would recommend it as a nice little time killer for if you want a bite-sized, quiet romance to watch.
 
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