I can’t shake Five Centimeters Per Second. Toono’s experience as an adult — I identify with it. Feel it as my state. The details of how we got there are very different and appear far less breathtaking, but we wind up in a similar place, going through motions, not knowing how long we’ve been on auto-pilot. It’s a common story. That wont sit well with some viewers who look for extraordinary things in the stories they watch and/or read. The rest of this might be spoilerish.

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I avoided reading anything on Kanon when it was airing. Pretty much, I thought Kanon would be a solid tear-jerker like Air, something that had a light hearted bit thrown in here and there to provide contrast, but really just wanted to make your eyes water. So far after eight episodes, Kanon has had me laughing a lot, very much more than I thought I would be. Yuichi, the male in this harem, is one funny SOB. I actually like the guy, which is an odd feeling for a harem show.

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I’ve been slack on writing about Mushi-Shi and highlighting the stories I thought played with human concepts in interesting ways. Maybe if I get the motivation to write an end of series post for it I will, but most people don’t come here for the text, so there’s less motivation there. Anyway, I think the episodes in volume 5 has the strongest collection of stories from the series so far.

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I can see why Funimation chose Aquarion to test the season box-set release instead of releasing it the traditional one volume at a time. Aquarion has names behind it that anime fans in the US recognize like Shoji Kawamori and Yoko Kanno, so Funimation can market the show. Who doesn’t like Yoko Kanno?

Though after watching the first volume, it’s pretty easy to see why Aquarion was chosen as a season-set guinea pig. The first five episodes are quite lame. I know I probably would not have bought volume two after seeing volume one.

Sure, most mecha shows are either super cheesy or are trying their hardest to prove mecha can be a serious business. Aquarion straddles the line quite deliberately in equal parts that it comes off as trying too hard without a clue. Eventually it sorts it self out enough to dump some interesting ideas about some shadow angel bad guys who harvest humans as food and that there are reincarnated heroes who are able to fight them.

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I burned through the first half of Blood+. Normally, it takes me forever and a day to get around to watching a box set. If I go the collected box set route, it usually means I didn’t find it worthy enough to spend the extra money to get the initial single volume releases. So box sets are usually a I’ll see it when I see it, instead of a must see this now type of thing. Getting a box set felt a little different with Blood+ since it was actually one of the shows I was eager to see.

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