Anime
The Sky Crawlers
While it doesn’t sound like a normal thing to say about a Mamoru Oshii film, watch The Sky Crawlers for the air to air combat sequence eye candy. They’re cool, worth waiting for, and serve as anchors for the exploration in the film. However, from a director with a reputation of thoughtful films, The Sky [...]
Girls, Guns, Propellers and…
Strike Witches feels a lot like one of my all time favorite anime, Battle Athletes Victory. There’s similarities, a convenient excuse for teenage girls to be the only hope for mankind, an international cast of characters, aliens, the dead parent of the clueless main character as a central figure, and the girls in Battle Athletes [...]
Walking Into Nanoha
It takes a while for Magical Lyrical Girl Nanoha to get going. The first six episodes left me bored, wondering how and why this show is notable enough to still be talked about. Also, given the number of amazing figures made for the franchise, I expected a higher level of visual appeal. The character models [...]
Sword of the Stranger and 2D Power
Producer Masahiko Minami and director Masahiro Ando of studio Bones created Sword of the Stranger as a desire to show the strengths of hand drawn animation in an action film. This is a particularly interesting goal to put forth considering hand drawn animation shrinks in relevance every year. Advances in technology have rapidly eaten up [...]
Finding the Action, Soul Eater
One of the things that I like about the niche anime we tend to get on dvd is most of these shows weren’t expected to run very long (12-26 half hour episodes), so they would end in a reasonable amount of time. This preference meant I passed on the action/fighting-type shows like Naruto, Bleach, and [...]
Chu-Bra!! Fun With Parody
Here is my favorite example so far of how I see the absurd premise of Chu-Bra!! creating parody with overused paint-by-numbers scenes in anime. In a flashback during episode 5, Nayu’s grandmother comforts the crying five year old Nayu, and gives the silliest take on the “I will protect you” scene that I’ve viewed:
Chu-Bra!!: Fight Like a Kaleido Star
Reiko Yoshida is in charge of Chu-Bra!!’s series composition. Among other things, Yoshida was in charge of the series composition of Kaleido Star, a show that I really enjoyed overall. I feel a lot of similarities between Chu-Bra!! and Kaleido Star, which is natural given they share the same series composer. Both shows belong to [...]
