Genndy Tartakovsky’s at the helm, so, it’ll be good.
yeah i trust genndy
Was re-watching this battle not along ago. Forgot how amazing the ending was:
Not at all worried about more Samurai Jack.
wait I just remembered Mako Iwamatsu is dead
Is this going to be like Ahab washed up on the shores of California, half-dead? Wanders a world empty of revenge but drenched in blood
I thought Kinaiver was going to a nice place, and then they ended the latest episode with Nori threatening to unleash pain terrorism on the entire world.
At least the world got one good Trigger show this season
Like most animes, Kiznaiver works pretty well when they’re just making the characters bump against each other, and collapses when they try to do The Main Plot.
The best Japan Cartoons of the season, in order:
- Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable
-
The Lost Village
It’s actually really, really hard to pull off intentionally bad as your comic style, but they do it. -
Kumamiko
Starts out with wacky talking-bear and country bumpkin jokes, veers into “everyone manipulates and/or abuses a socially-anxious teenage girl for their own self-aggrandizement or self-satisfaction, because life in small, patriarchal rural towns is miserable.” Laugh a minute! The final episode will probably try to redeem these characters and totally fail! - TIE! Luluco and Kiznaiver
Both are inconsistent messes but average out to be pretty entertaining.
These are the cartoons I feel are worth calling out. Flying Witch is cute but it’s too chill, when I watch it I feel like I’m going to doze off at any time.
Flying Witch is as tasty as a nice, warm cup of cocoa and about as filling
Tonkatsu DJ Agetarou is secretly the best short of the season because it’s the only show that invites viewers to CHILL OUT (note: don’t chill out inside a freezer)
I think Tanaka Is Always Listless is hilarious because it’s set up as some harem show with nearly every option available (best friend who’s also the same sex! the popular girl! his little sister! his best friend’s little sister! a crazy girl!), but Tanaka is oblivious to everything and if he did see what was going on, he would be too lazy to give a fuck. Truly, he is the hero modern anime needs.
I was going to pick DJ Agetarou but is not available in Spain, so it’s going to wait for two weeks until I go back. The pleasures of watching anime while living between to different regions.
Anyway, the only thing that I sticked to the end were Luluco and Lost Village. I dropped Kiznaiver at some point I cannot remember but I would pick it up later, I guess.
Luluco is yes, very irregular and the Sex & Violence with Machspeed chapter was cringeworthy as hell. And I am saying this as someone who enjoyed the original short. But there was something in repeating the same plot verbatim while adding explanations of what’s going on that made me need forty minutes to finish a short anime chapter.
The only thing I can say for sure about Lost Village: it’s a thing that happened. It was really consistent in putting some stakes or a thread and then go “yeah, whatever” with them. The end with its sudden cut to credits is a great example. And it’s like, I don’t know: you introduce a ton of people and some of them are just there. Nanakis are important, but a lot of relevant characters doesn’t look like they have met them, let alone have one. But we got Lovepon, detective girl and a lot of fun dumb situations so time well spent in the end, even if it went as “Flamenco” as I hoped at the beginning.
It grabbed my attention better than Kiznaiver, at least.
Gundam ZZ is claiming it’s not Anime but I am fairly sure it is
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It is, perhaps, even more anime than usual.
I am watching Attack on Titan because it is on Netflix and I heard someone say the name one time.
I’ve never watched Evangelion but this is just steampunk Evangelion, right? Titantic enemies with different “variants” whose basic weaknesses we know but whose origins and nature are completely unknown assaulting a last bastion of humanity literally built as a fortress city, with a bearded round-glassed protagonist’s dad as the mysterious purveyor of titanic-enemy knowledge. And also a whole lot of despair and losing and dying.
There’s only one season on Netflix which I assumed was the whole show because anime but I only have like 4 episodes left and there’s like a shitload of unanswered questions, either this thing is going to go off the cosmological deep end or it’s going to pack all the info into a Xenogears Disc 2 type plotdump or there’s a second season out there somewhere.
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And, much like Eva, Attack on Titan sucks
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I like the Kago version I’ve wholly imagined
Yes I know, Parataxis - that’s part of it
I mean it has interesting and potentially dramatic concepts but it’s utterly mired in this EVERYONE SCREAMS THEIR FEELINGS melodrama which is most of what I identify as “anime bullshit” when I’m complaining about how I hate anime bullshit. I think that’s the thing about anime: great concepts executed in the most annoying and cloying possible way.
Most all contemp Japanese moving image entertainment is saturated with this and it is wretched
I like to think there was a specific modern-historical point where Jaytainment completely forgot how to do subtlety and grace but I dare say the work that demonstrated that at all was rare and exported well precisely because it wasn’t the rest of the dreck
Yeah. I have extremely limited perspective on this but I think it’d be a mistake to try to see a historical pivot point; rather it’s been mostly superXtreme melodrama the whole time with periodic bright spots of sublime and subtle beauty. There was Bebop, and Satoshi Kon, and like, Genius Party was good. Ghibli’s still around making beautiful things. There’s always something out there.
Attack on Titan is not one of those somethings.
Obv a huge part of any large entertainment industry is gonna be shit. Actually worthwile anime still gets made, ping pong the animation aired the about the same time as titan for example
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I mean sure I and everyone reasonable subscribes to the “99% of everything is shit” philosophy but anime (and apparently according to Brooks by extension all popular Jaytainment) is shit in the same consistently narrow band of ways. Why, what is the reason for this, what could it be.
because all culturally bound media is shit in the exact consistent ways of that culture, it’s just easier to see with something outside your culture.
I mean America has Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and Halt and Catch Fire and Homeland. American shit is infatuated with over-budgeted soap operas about asshole anti-heroes and their families, covering up for a paucity of good writing with glossy production and youtube-able ‘badass’ moments where a character does something horrible but have a totally neutral expression on their face while they do it.
As a corollary, it’s also easy to have a blindspot to non-local media’s badness. Many westerners became anime fans because it was so different from what they’ve experienced previously, so much so that many of the things that were already trite cliches by the time an american teen saw it was some kind of radical new way of story-telling to them. China loves hollywood blockbusters and there’s basically nothing as awful as a Marvel-Disney-Star-Wars production to my jaded eyes.
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