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Ccs posted:Woah the new trailer for Mamoru Hosodas Belle just got released and I don’t know the last time I needed to hear the full version of a song so badly. Does anyone know who the singer/composers are? Masakatsu Takagi has done the score for the last few Hosoda movies (has a Playlist on Spotify) and I'm hoping he will be on Belle. I loving love this pair and the movies combined with his music get an emotional reaction from me every time.
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Apr 2, 2021 19:08
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Hosoda really loves making films that juxtapose reality with the digital world doesn't he? This is what, his third? fourth? film to explore that dichotomy? I'm not complaining because wow it looks pretty, it definitely seems to be turning into his signature "thing"
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Apr 2, 2021 19:44
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I watched Natsu e no Tobira, a movie based on the less famous gay french schoolboy manga by Keiko Takemiya. It was very pretty and had lots of interesting shots and sequences, however the music was distractingly bad 70s library fare that didn't even fit the melodramatic theme and were more fit for a crime caper show. It only had like three tracks it used which was very tiring as well. The plot was classic shoujo melodrama, unrequited loves and suicides and a 20-step gun duel. A bad sign of its mediocrity is I'm already forgetting a lot of the imagery despite having finished it three minutes ago. I think the montage where the mc talks about how awesome it is to sleep with an older woman, and the scene where his gay friend confesses his love juxtaposed with an intricate chalk animation of a raging horse symbolizing his unbridled horniness, are the only things that still stand out to me now.
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Apr 2, 2021 23:06
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Arcsquad12 posted:Hosoda really loves making films that juxtapose reality with the digital world doesn't he? This is what, his third? fourth? film to explore that dichotomy? I'm not complaining because wow it looks pretty, it definitely seems to be turning into his signature "thing" Off the top of my head I think it's his third counting the Digimon movie he did. Second I think for original movies.
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Apr 2, 2021 23:23
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Digimon, Summer Wars and now Belle. Also yeah you can definitely see the Frozen art design in Belle.
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Apr 2, 2021 23:34
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80s double feature: Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth and Saint Seiya: Warriors of the Final Holy Battle. All of the Saint Seiya movies are exactly the same in terms of plot so how much you enjoy them depends entirely on the imagery and pacing of the events. Legend of Crimson Youth is the first feature length Saint Seiya movie and it tries to differentiate itself from the kids matinee style of the first movies by being BIG. This movie is slow and portentous and grand. It uses the extra widescreen space for some genuinely impressive backgrounds and some sequences that seem inspired by golden age Disney films. However, slow and portentous is not the Saint Seiya way: Saint Seiya the show is impressive to me for being one of the best paced shonen ever made, a well edited and thrilling action show that never lets up but never overwhelms. It doesn't help that the plot is a repetitive mix of everything the series and other movies have given us so far. The villains have unexciting designs and half the fights are rehashes of the show, which are also the most exciting sequences which is a bad sign! They also hosed up Phoenix Ikki's power, which is to give people nightmares so bad it kills them, with a very uninspired nightmare sequence that abruptly ends. That said the villain's goal was to commit incest and he was so dedicated to this goal that with his dying breath he uses his powers to create a giant statue dedicated to incest, which is hilarious. Really this film followed the formula of the other movies by having 40 minutes of non-stop action, it just had an extra 30 minutes of slow-paced angst leading up to it. At least those 30 minutes have some really great imagery of decaying cityscape, one of my favorite things in anime that has disappeared:   I liked the second movie, and the final movie of the 80s Saint Seiya a little more. Despite not being as big I thought the animation had more oomph, the new enemy designs way more interesting, the fight choreography was probably the best of all the Seiya movies, and it has a genuinely freaky Phoenix Ikki nightmare sequence. It really muddles up the lore by involving The Bible and Satan and "a Chinese sun goddess" in the world of greek gods but hell. It got what makes Saint Seiya enjoyable a whole lot more than the last movie, it jumps right into the action and doesn't let up for 45 minutes. Anyway here are some cool shots from both films:    
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Apr 4, 2021 04:38
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I always feel a bit inadequate coming into this thread. Everyone's reviewing all sorts of movies, some I've never even heard of, and meanwhile I'm just going to a checklist of some of the big names. For example, I think most people here have some opinion on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, so I'm not doing near as much by bringing it up as someone rattling off a long list of forgotten but amazing 80s OVAs, but it's what I watched most recently, so it's what I'm talking about. Ghost in the Shell is a solid success as a franchise. Multiple TV shows, games, a critically acclaimed and (eventually) top grossing movie, and a manga brought stateside well before the modern era's habit of licensing everything that people make noise about. But ultimately, there are three things that people tend to think of. The first volume of the manga, the first movie, and the two seasons of Standalone Complex. Innocence, by contrast, is a secondary, a "oh, yeah. There's another one, isn't there?" or a "here's a more obscure thing that's better than the one all the normies talk about". Which... is kind of natural. The huge time gap between the first film and Innocence meant that it was an icon, its influence spread through films and anime worldwide. It's rare to be genre defining more than once, and the delay meant that Innocence couldn't ride the original's tailwinds to be thought of as "more of the same." It has to stand or fall on its own. ...Mostly, it just felt like it wobbled. It's not a bad film. Oshii's got a first rate eye for scene composition, and even with moments of 2000s CG being early 2000s CG, the film's got enough gorgeous visuals to justify its existence once you get on its wavelength. But I'm not sure if I'd say it was good, either. The plot is thin enough that it wouldn't rate a "Complex" on the show, and the spectacular visuals that help draw the story out to feature length don't feel as impactful as the pans over the city in the first film. The character dynamics make it worse. In theory, they should be a strong point. The Major is great, but she tends to dominate the screen when she's around. Section 9 left without its ace can make for a more balanced ensemble piece. Except they don't here. Batou takes the Major's place as a lesser "the one who gets everything done", while Togusa is pretty much useless, and nobody else has anything significant to do. (I'll pause here on the topic of Togusa. In most Ghost in the Shell, he is something of the butt of the unit. He's also a competent and honest officer who manages to prove his value just as often as he gets in over his head (sometimes even doing both at once.) Here, though, he just exists so that someone can be shocked at Batou's latest loose cannon move, with no real contributions of his own. It stands out all the more because the film's a detective story, which is normally Togusa's area of expertise.) The worst part, though, is the dialogue. While all iterations of the series have people casually discussing philosophy like it's sports scores, Innocence reaches a point where you're just watching two chatbots trained on Bartlett's. In a film with so much emphasis on puppets, it's a shame the writer shows so many of the strings. On a smaller issue, the scene with the Yakuza didn't feel like it played quite right. I admit that some of it might be watching this after playing Yakuza 0 and reading Hinamatsuri, adjusting the sympathy balance in a way the film couldn't account for, but the general balance is wrong here too, even aside from the current climate. Generally, this gag is set up so that the hero offers the villains a clear out, and they explicitly reject it, justifying whatever horrific vengeance the protagonist inflicts. Here, Batou opened with a demand, then immediately escalated to murdering everyone in the room when they showed they were armed (with weapons that weren't remotely a threat to a combat cyborg.) It crossed the line from funny heroic sociopathy to just feeling kinda gross, especially since we didn't get scenes making us personally dislike these Yakuza members prior to the slaughter. (They were involved in deeply scummy business, but the viewer isn't informed exactly how bad it is until long after they're dead.) It's amplified further by the minimal reactions from others, with Aramaki just wagging a finger and Togusa focusing more on his own life being at risk (when Batou had offered for him to stay in the car) than on, you know. Extrajudicial killings by the truckload. Basically, the gag didn't land for me. Also, man. The ending shot with the doll was terrible. Overall, I'm glad I saw it, and it's much, much better than the actually bad Ghost in the Shell material (Man Machine Interface was physically painful) but I wouldn't particularly recommend it, either. At least the ghost hacking scene was neat.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:38
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Submarine 707R: This is basically a Leiji show but underwater. Just not as good. There's a baffling art style difference between most of the cast in this and the main characters daughter. Characters are very simple archtypes and the underwater battle is predictable if you are familiar with submarine fiction but the cgi is great! I have nothing deep to say about this, cause there's very little to it. Its 2 hours of shipservice, so if you really like submarines or yamato it might be worth a watch
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Apr 7, 2021 00:35
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I watched the Violet Evergarden movie several days ago (the sequel one, not Eternity). I had watched the TV series when it came out and thought that it had some good episodes and fantastic visuals but the writing seemed underwhelming. I don't really know how to describe what ticked me off about it, it just "felt" flat to me. The movie is all the TV series is but raised to the max. The dialogue still felt flat; there would be times when it boldly declared 'this is the grandeur of powerful writing that moves your heart' and then we would see / hear what was written and it wouldn't live up to the emotional pull that it needed to. I can't tell if this is just a translation problem, or if this issue persists across languages. I will say, though, that it is the most (visually) beautiful anime movie to date. Every single shot in this film was stunning. I cried during it, but for unrelated reasons. Or maybe the movie was just really good at getting me to think about other sad things. I'd give it a 7/10, maybe an 8/10 for the visuals alone.
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Apr 7, 2021 03:05
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Malsangoroth posted:I watched the Violet Evergarden movie several days ago (the sequel one, not Eternity). I had watched the TV series when it came out and thought that it had some good episodes and fantastic visuals but the writing seemed underwhelming. I don't really know how to describe what ticked me off about it, it just "felt" flat to me. The movie is all the TV series is but raised to the max. The dialogue still felt flat; there would be times when it boldly declared 'this is the grandeur of powerful writing that moves your heart' and then we would see / hear what was written and it wouldn't live up to the emotional pull that it needed to. I can't tell if this is just a translation problem, or if this issue persists across languages. I will say, though, that it is the most (visually) beautiful anime movie to date. Every single shot in this film was stunning. I cried during it, but for unrelated reasons. Or maybe the movie was just really good at getting me to think about other sad things. I'd give it a 7/10, maybe an 8/10 for the visuals alone. The tv series felt like something written by someone who had read about things like emotions and trauma but never experienced it themselves, only seen it from the outside looking in. Is how I can best describe it. When they hit upon the same emotions you've felt at some time it can be extraordinarily effective but it's just a passing feeling. It makes you cry but not the kind of cry you remember.
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Apr 7, 2021 05:56
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Taiyou no Mokushiroku: A Spirit of the Sun: A rather low effort ova series (2 x 1 hour and 17 mins) from Madhouse. I've read enough of Kawaguchi to know he's a great author so I'm not going to put the blame of the mediocrity of this on him. The VA performances themselves are good enough and the supporting cast is likeable (with the Taiwanese gangster Zhang being a standout) but the series fails to engage. The actual plot lines should also be interesting, from disaster stories to refugee crisis and political turmoil, but the presentation of it fails to make the watcher care. I've certainly watched worse disaster anime so it's not like its a huge loss, but I expected better. At least its not as bad as Japan Sinks. 6
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Apr 10, 2021 23:50
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Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie: fairly boring. I think I don't find the basic dirty jokes in this series funny any more. It also does nothing with the fact that its a movie. 5
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Apr 18, 2021 00:51
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I watched TO-Y, an OVA based off of a hit manga about a punk band leader that wants to pursue his own sound at all costs, even if it means losing out on success, and also he's dating a 15 year old who might be a cat. The OVA was presented in the sort of abstract music video inspired style. There's a lot of impressive and creative animation but it felt hollow to me somehow, like it was putting it on to seem hipper than it really is. That is until the second half, when it gives way to a genuinely electrifying presentation of the experience of a live concert. This is the best part of the OVA and it has nothing to do with any of the characters; we see the rivalry between the goth punk fans and the highschool girls that are going to the same stadium after the punk band gets replaced with a soulless pop star last minute, with one particularly Sandman looking goth who was prepared to slit his throat until the climactic band performance by our heroes, and a bunch of people running around to bars telling their friends what's going on. It made me nostalgic for the days of sitting in bars listening to bands jam out waiting for a buddy to come along and tell you and your friends the next cool place to go, which seem so far away now. It also lovingly depicts late 80s japanese fashions that gets glossed over these days in favor of city pop and Popeye approved fashions which I liked. I appreciated the disdain the source material must have had for Japanese pop culture but it didn't really come across in the OVA, which had 0 punk music or anything, instead having 80s alt-rock hits. Sometimes they were good but mostly they were indistinguishable from the heartless sell out music the story claims it's trying to avoid. Frankly I think the director was too soulless himself to really be able to "get" what the source material was getting at. That's just my impression though. Looking at the director's other stuff he hasn't directed anything else of note, just the inferior remake of an 80s shoujo and one of the more forgettable Lupin movies, although he was animaton director on a lot of stuff which makes sense considering the quality of animation here.
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Apr 24, 2021 05:38
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That's actually a lot of words for something I didn't particularly enjoy, so maybe someone out there would like it more. If you like the sort of 80s aesthetics that are in vogue you'll probably like it a lot, although I'm fairly burnt out on those
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Apr 24, 2021 05:39
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Because I could and because I got dosed with extra strength coffee and can't fall asleep I watched B.B. Fish, an OVA by the same director as the previous OVA. This is based on a 15 volume manga but is only 30 minutes long which probably accounts for why it's so nonsensical. It's about three friends in Hawaii? Some tropical island? searching for the Legendary Fish, although no fishing happens and mostly the MC tries to cheat on his girlfriend with a local. The director has a good sense of place and his backgrounds and settings are very believable and capture both the memory of being somewhere along with the physical presence of the place itself which is no small feat for an animator. It treads the line between nostalgia and a present lived experience in a way that's somewhat uncomfortable to me, so he has good artistic chops. However he clearly doesn't care about voice acting much because in both OVAs the voice acting was terrible and unbelievable even by anime standards. People sounded like they were talking to themselves which lends a dreamlike quality but is also extremely distracting. The animation in this was excellent and everyone was drawn like an actual person proportion wise. I think personally it has a slight edge over T-OY for being shorter and a truly absurd ending where the hero activates their third eye and gains super swimming powers so he can rescue his girlfriend from a massive undersea cave which made me laugh. It's probably the worse of the two if I'm being honest though. The only other anime this director did of interest to me is Bt'X, which is a Masami Kurumada adaptation so his animation chops and utter disregard for even trying to depict naturalistic human conversations or contact in any remotely believable form will really serve him well there I think.
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Apr 24, 2021 06:22
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moZH0tKUT8o Figured I'd cross-post this here as well, considering he's talking about the films of Patlabor. Licensing rights for dubs and releases are muddy and it's sad when history gets lost due to who currently owns the franchise license. So it's cool that this guy managed to preserve the Manga Entertainment dub that I'd never heard before. It's something I want to check out.
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Apr 28, 2021 07:27
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Arcsquad12 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moZH0tKUT8o Peter Marinker's Goto is really good. When I upgraded my movies to Blu-ray I made sure to keep my older DVDs and added their audio as an additional track (I rip all my movies onto a media server).
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Apr 29, 2021 12:38
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A Doomed Purloiner posted:Peter Marinker's Goto is really good. When I upgraded my movies to Blu-ray I made sure to keep my older DVDs and added their audio as an additional track (I rip all my movies onto a media server). Oh poo poo that is Peter Marinker isn't it? The guy playing Arakawa in the UK dub absolutely steals it. The guy who preserved the UK track to play alongside the Blu Ray release also did a comparison video of the Unjust Peace speech and Fairman runs away as the clear winner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEPKcMhpHCY
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Apr 29, 2021 15:46
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Watched Take the X Train, an OVA by Rintaro. It was great! It's misanthropic to an extent that puts Miyazaki and Oshii to shame, everyone in it is ugly, vain, short-sighted and stupid. The ghost of Japanese industrialization comes back to haunt our protagonist, a young man in the train industry who doesn't think about anything other than sex and food. The government psychic conspiracy that exists in the fringes of the film is reminiscent of Philip K Dick's more paranoid works. The titular ghost train is as animalistic as our protagonist, the sound of its train engine more bestial growl than burning coal. The soundtrack is entirely made up of variations of Duke Ellington's Take the A Train except a short scene featuring Mambo No. 5, and the anime is dedicated to him. The background work reminds me of fashion magazines, showing the shallow facade of the world this film takes place in. The ending is disturbing but triumphant, with the train leaking oil over the corpses of psionically vaporized Men in Black in a callback to an earlier scene where the protagonist stops in the countryside to take a piss. Great film, and I can't believe it took me so long to watch it.
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May 1, 2021 04:17
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Just remembered a film I watched back in high school, Sword of the Stranger. The stuff with Nanashi and Kotaro is really good and Luo Lang is great whenever he shows up. I didn't really care for the subplot with the Daimyo or with the Ming warriors evil plan, but that ending remains one of the best sword fights ever.
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May 3, 2021 16:57
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Arcsquad12 posted:Just remembered a film I watched back in high school, Sword of the Stranger. The stuff with Nanashi and Kotaro is really good and Luo Lang is great whenever he shows up. I didn't really care for the subplot with the Daimyo or with the Ming warriors evil plan, but that ending remains one of the best sword fights ever. I love that film. I think that's where Yutaka Nakamura really came to a lot of people's attention. He had done great work up until then, but that sword fight really made poeple go "what, who did this, who animated this amazing thing." The whole film has incredible visuals though, there's not a single clash that doesn't look exceptional. The final fight just has the absolute perfect combination of music and choreography.
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May 3, 2021 18:45
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Nanashi dyes his hair to fit in and Luo Lang is explicitly coded and identified as "Western" (though whether this means Western China or European is ambiguous) but it's neat how both swordsmen are explicitly outsiders to their respective cultures and don't really give a poo poo about the Ming or the Daimyo's plans and have their own reasons for being there.
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May 3, 2021 19:09
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Sword of the stranger is one of my anime blu rays I will never let go of.
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May 3, 2021 22:57
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Looking at the films I've watched I tend to drift towards genre films more than anime films, if that makes sense. They lean into the conventions of genre like thrillers, sports, jidaigeki more than they do into so-called anime tropes. I think it's why I empathize a lot with that quote from Hosoda where he emphasizes that he makes films, not anime.
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May 3, 2021 23:52
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EDIT. Wrong thread. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 03:31 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 01:26
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I wish we got a new Kawajiri film every few years. It’s bonkers the last film he directed was Highlander in 2007 (which was really good!) But apparently he’s been storyboarding on a lot of the best series thatve come out in the past 5 years so maybe he enjoys that more than full directing duties.
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May 4, 2021 03:28
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watched tekkonkinkreet the other day. pretty good movie, absolutely phenomenal visuals. i feel like i don't really connect very well with "two brothers making their way in a harsh world" as a plot basis in general, but the movie did it fairly well. some of the scenes were incredibly powerful and have really stuck with me, in particular kimura killing his mentor really made me choke up even though i didn't have terribly strong opinions on either character before that scene. don't have much of a thematic reading on the movie or anything, usually i need to watch something a second time for that and idk if i'll be watching this movie again in the near future even though i definitely think it was good. it was loving wild how halfway through the movie some guys just started loving flying around and that went entirely unexplained and mostly not even remarked upon by the movie. spent the whole time going "what the gently caress are these guys aliens? imaginary? dudes with super powers???" and the movie just kinda went "who cares about that poo poo, check out some crazy abstract imagery" and i'm glad it decided to do that
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May 17, 2021 18:19
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Looks like Hosoda's new movie "Belle" will premiere in Japan July 6. Probably another year before a US release.
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May 18, 2021 00:35
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Recently watched Colorful. Pretty solid movie. It explores some tough subject matter (teen suicide) with a compellingly unlikeable protagonist, but unfortunately it's not able to stick the landing. It asks some heavy questions by the end and resorts to some moralizing, simple answers. Still, it's the sort of anime movie you don't get much of and its realistic art style works quite well. Ultimately a worthwhile watch. After that, I decided that I might as well finish up all of Keiichi Hara's non-franchise anime movies so I watched Birthday Wonderland, strangely localized as The Wonderland in what I assume was some sort of anti-birthday agenda. More of an isekai in the classical storybook sense than the modern anime sense, thankfully. It's fine enough. There's not much to it so it has to get by on its whimsicality, but it's not whimsy enough to get by on that alone. It's inoffensive fluff, something I feel fits alongside something like Napping Princess (perhaps because I feel like both movies could easily be reworked as live action Disney movies). Unlike the rest of Hara's movies it goes with a more traditional modern anime style for its character designs, which suits what it's going for but makes it look more generic. It's perfectly enjoyable in the moment but contains little that will stick with me. But there are worse things a movie can be, I suppose. I also watched the second and third movies in the Fate/Stay Night Heaven's Feel trilogy. Didn't sit well with me at all but heck, it cannot be denied that I gave it the 'ol college try and then some.
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May 21, 2021 12:37
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I watched Ryokunohara Labyrinth: Sparkling Phantom, an OVA based off of a work by the late Kana Hoshino and directed by Narumi Kakinouchi of Vampire Princess Miyu fame. It's about two incredibly gay boys who have been friends since childhood and what happens when a witch from another dimension steals the body and soul of one of them because she's jealous of how loved he is. It makes gestures towards something deeper, the way friends may one day drift apart and how your dreams can collapse in front of you but never really confronts them and ends content to enjoy the present moment. A flashback in the first third of the film was a standout moment to me, being very sweet and cute while stirring up something nostalgic in me. The soundtrack is really good and catchy and the art direction is pleasant as well. No real complaints here except for the godawful fansubbing effort that had gigantic sized subs, this is thankfully easily fixable in modern video players that let you set your own override font. Yet another ova that has succeeded in it's job of making me interested in the manga, all the other kids with main character designs tell me this world has a lot of other bittersweet stories to tell.
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May 22, 2021 05:13
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she's back Shirobako the movie. Bit of a retread of the series really. The studio starts in a mess, they get it back together. After that there's production issues, an evil rival studio and everyone does their character trait again. They gave Ai a terrible haircut, which is a shame. There's some new characters but honestly they don't really do all that much. The new bad guy is essentially the same character that already existed in the series, the new PA guy is just an exposition tool to help remember characters and the new girl that prominently appears on the poster appears in 3 scenes total. It's all a bit of a waste that makes me wonder why this even is a movie. Outside of the meta fit of a movie about making a (frankly terrible looking) movie the whole thing would have been better as another long series. Now it just doesn't really leave room for any character to really grow, they just get introduced for their shticks and leave the story. There's some miniscule development for the main girls, but a single episode of the original series accomplished more. The story just doesn't do anything new and rushes through what it does do as it feels the need to bring every single character from the series back. Animation wise it doesn't actually look any better then the main show and outside of 2 decently fun musical sequences there's nothing new on that front. For all the emphasis the movie puts on the fictional studio not being happy with ending of the movie they produce, im surprised the real PA works released something so mediocre and that feels so rushed. 6
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May 26, 2021 00:58
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Haikara-san ga Tooru Movie 1 and 2. Starts out as a rather charming tale of a strong, independent girl in Taisho era with charming animation (especially for the oft rather neglected animation wise demographic of shoujo) with a cast of likeable characters but by the 2nd movie the animation quality collapses, the story gets stuck in all too familiar shoujo tropes which ill fit the established personalities of the characters and i grew rather bored with the repetitiveness of the storytelling. Spread out over 8 volumes, multiple misunderstandings leading to multiple occasions (misunderstood) cheating probably works better then in 2 movies. When the primary thrust of the 2nd movie was an amnesia plot I largely lost interest in the movie. The main character's alcoholism remains charming throughout though, she's a very cute drunk. a 6 for movie 1, a 4 for movie 2
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Jun 20, 2021 11:54
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Darn, I was looking forward to the Shirobako movie.
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Jun 20, 2021 21:11
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Nana Toshi Monogatari: Hokkyokukai Sensen: while LOGH is Yoshiki Tanaka's best known anime adaptation, his epics have received several adaptations. arslan senki, tytania etc. This ova sets up an interesting setting as an excuse for its battleship fights (making the historical 'inspirations' for its battles even more obvious then they were in LOGH) but the 40 minute run time leaves very little room to see any of it, of the titular seven cities, we see only 2 make more then a cameo appearance. Apparently this one was only based on a single novel rather then an entire book series like the rest of his works, but it still feels like its rushing through various key moments of the book. Animation is servicable, with some nice looking military equipment and the music is grating. Just stick with LOGH instead, best I can say about this is that its better then Tytania. 6
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Jul 15, 2021 23:55
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I watched Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. It was pretty good! Unsure how I feel about it as a Lupin movie, not even necessarily because of how gallant Lupin is but really everyone looks weird and Miyazaki-fied. It also feels a tad overstuffed and by the halfway point I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by action setpieces. Gorgeous movie with lots of fun little details in every single frame although that contributes to the overwhelmingness of it all. I'm glad I watched it but I don't really have a desire to watch it again.
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Jul 31, 2021 14:59
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I watch Chivas 123 aka Sorceror on the Rocks, and lest anyone have rose tinted glasses toward 90s fantasy anime especially in comparison to isekai, let them remember that the 90s had some real stinkers too. Though not an isekai it has all the perversities people associate with bad isekai, like main character being a slaveowner, forced prostitution, and of course boring, predictable writing. There are a few well animated sequences all involving a giant monster and explosions, but everything else is rather ugly even for the 90s and unexciting. The funniest part of this anime is that it had to be renamed in western markets so as to not upset Chivas Regal whisky.
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Aug 1, 2021 23:36
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On-Gaku. A true gem of a movie, one of the most original animated films I've seen in a long time. It's been almost two years since I last attended a live music show and this captured the energy and more, it was a great reminder of what I love about music and why I continue to practice it. It's a very funny movie with a dry sense of humor and ear for naturalistic dialog that is rare in anime. The finale is one of the most electric animated sequences I've ever seen. This has cred, especially compared to the other anime about indie music I watched this year, To-Y, which was about a punk band but had an entirely pop music ost.
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Aug 7, 2021 05:26
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Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time   9
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Aug 14, 2021 01:14
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I'm mad they didn't fight over the memory of him being so hosed up
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Aug 18, 2021 13:45
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watched Etotama: Nyankyaku Banrai, the sequel ova to the etotama anime from 2015, yesterday. I vaguely recall this thing getting announced as a second season, but instead what got unceremoniously dumped was a 30 minute ova and 2 picture dramas. Not much too say about this really, it feels like more like something they put out due to some contractual obligation then anything made with passion. The new character is introduced in a short recap where they unsuccessfully attempt to make you care for her, everyone shortly does their shtick, it has the series signature best in anime cgi fight and then it ends. There's just nothing to it. If this was released as a bonus on a dvd like 1 month after the anime aired I would have probably enjoyed it more, but the whole thing just felt like a waste of time. 5
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Aug 22, 2021 09:37
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