Back to DawsonChristy's Profile DawsonChristy's Profile

Released in 2012. The ideal high school romance anime where the characters do a lot of monologue and their experience of love is highlighted in the show is a genre that was slowly shoved to the sidelines for a long time. The premise of the anime instantly grabs you. There is a girl who has no care for anything except her studies and a guy who is a brute but a gentle misunderstood soul. Their interaction was pretty fun to watch since the girl is the only person that can get close to the guy and the guy is annoying the hell out of the ... girl. Little by little though, the relationship of the two gradually grows into something that is really adorable. The anime is pretty straight forward pretty much focusing on this story alone. That’s right. There are no other love stories in the anime. Or rather, the anime was still building up one but it was surely not as important as the main love story. This was great thing because the story of the two characters is really fun to watch and their story might seem straight forward at first, but it eventually reveals some surprises you never expected the show to do. The characters are the ones that really made the show amazing. They’re very interesting and utilized pretty nicely. Every character grows on you from the main to the side characters. Haru and Shizuku are just cute together and their character dynamic is pretty fun to watch. An unpredictable guy and girl who aren’t fazed easily make for an interesting love story anime. This anime is not perfect and one of the reasons is because the primary focus of the show is the love story yet it was thinly spread out throughout the anime. There is a decent progression but the relationship of the characters are often dreadfully dragged that nothing satisfactory comes out of it. Majority of the episodes have the relationship on stand still going absolutely nowhere and you wait for a decent resolution only to be sorely disappointed. It was cute but thirteen episodes are too long for something cute that doesn’t have much to tell. The character design is pretty decent. The characters have unique look to them.The animation is pretty decent as well. I say decent because there is enough to tell a story but you can see the quality differs from most episodes. One thing I noticed is the facial features often not having enough details in some episodes and there are scenes where just the mouth moves. The eyes don’t even blink. The facial expressions are nicely animated though as well as the fight scenes. These are often the best moments. In the end I would say if you like romance go and watch this it’s not perfect but it’s okay.

Released in 2006. Welcome to the NHK is social commentary at its most disquieting and illuminating. It is a show that skillfully avoids moralization and clumsy allegory and instead makes a dramatically satisfying and personal story out of a widespread but largely unacknowledged occurrence. In spite of the occasional comic moment it is, for the most part, also an uncompromising piece whose unvarnished realism can sometimes make it difficult to watch. But if one can put this reservation aside, I think that anybody who enjoys biting critiques and fascinating character studies will find it to be a worthwhile view.The show’s greatest strength lies in its ... characters, whose various quirks make the story all the more affecting. Satou himself is quite likeable, for underneath an outward shell of cynicism and skepticism, he’s a complex person: good-hearted but also somewhat obsessive, socially inept to the point where little occurrences have driven him into his current state but still salvageable as a person, and, thankfully, devoid of arrogance. He’s the rare anime character whose failings are truly what make him relatable. Like Satou, the other characters are frustrating and yet strangely likeable, and it soon emerges that nearly all of them have demons and blame their suffering on what is, ultimately, paranoia masquerading as an outside agent, whether they name it the NHK, an evil God, or anything else. Misaki, the mysterious “savior” endlessly fascinating, and the show was quite skilled at changing my opinion of her back and forth. I loved her at times, despised her at others, was often irritated by the lack of answers surrounding her, and sometimes even felt sorry for her, but she never lost my interest. The show is, in the end, as much about her as it is about Satou, and their troubled and complicated relationship turns out to be the most effective piece of drama in the show. The character design, on the other hand, is unremarkable, with Yoshitoshi ABe’s drawing of Misaki proving to be the sole exception, and although the show usually looked fine to me, there was the occasional episode in which the never-impressive animation utterly fell apart and people’s faces began to look runny and shapeless. Indeed, there are whole episodes in which the background becomes alarmingly muddled, and while it’s not a gaping problem, it is a nuisance that distracts from the story. The musical score, conversely, is almost impeccable. Consisting of melancholic guitar, piano, and harmonica pieces and complemented by quirky but understated soft-rock insert songs, it perfectly underlies the show’s atmosphere. The world seen in Welcome to the NHK is one whose noxious fumes seep out the instant one opens the door, and much of what we see is quite disturbing. The show dwells on the high level of sexualization in the world of hikkomori and otaku, and while the nudity serves to move a psychological study along rather than exploit or arouse, the amount present can sometimes be overwhelming. The show contains virtually no graphic content, but it directly grapples with suicide, drug abuse, and poverty, and the degree to which it depicts its characters’ internal suffering can make it difficult to watch. People repeatedly behave self-destructively. Indeed, in spite of being labelled as a dark “comedy”, the show really only attempts to tickle our funny bones in the first few episodes, after which the light tone largely disappears with only the occasional bit of comic relief. I was laughing so hard in those episodes that I expected the ride to be very different from the one it turned out to be, and I sometimes wonder whether the commentary may have been best done complemented with the same sort of utter hilarity I got from the earliest stages. Admittedly, it’s difficult to make a social critique and include “entertainment” without distracting from or undermining the original purpose, and I think that the heavy-handed approach ultimately worked well for the series. Nonetheless, this is not light entertainment in any sense, and it is best taken in small doses. It’s hardly a criticism to say that it makes better sociological commentary than entertainment. With that and my few other minor quibbles out of the way, I will say that Welcome to the NHK is a must-see for anyone interested in learning about the darker sides of Japanese society, as well as the dark side of anime fandom. It’s enlightening and yet also depressing and disturbing at times. So this is what I would call a very long review for me anyway. So I would say if you are of age then go watch this show it’s very good.

Released in 2012. Hyouka is a mystery show like many others but unlike many others there are no murders, there are no grand thefts or supernatural happenings to stimulate it into life. No, Hyouka is about sometimes deep, sometimes trivial but always personal mysteries cropping up in the lives of its main characters and the efforts they go to solve them - whether it be a half-forgotten memory that bugs them or an odd Tannoy announcement that piques their curiosity. Hyouka is a show about curiosity and that theme runs richly and deeply throughout its entire runtime. That all said Hyouka is more than just ... a justification for my opinion. It is a really good show too. At its base aesthetic level, Hyouka is a gorgeously drawn and beautifully animated show - the character designs are simple but varied, sparkling, cute and expressive and the setting has so much personality in its warm and rustic glow that we understand it without being told too much about it. Kyoto Animation makes a lot of very engaging shows in a visual sense (even if only in that sense) but this is probably their most beautiful series. The show defines the relationships between the four main characters through intelligent dialogue which gradually changes as the characters progress. Given that some of the episodes are almost spent entirely in dialogue with at least one episode being set entirely in the characters’ club room; the wit and banter of the characters as well as the effectiveness of the show’s mysteries are all that are there to keep us interested. The characters themselves - namely Hotaro, Satoshi, Mayaka and Chitanda - slip past all the standard stereotypes that you could possibly expect. From the synopsis, I had feared that Hotaro would be one of those boring protagonists without any life or will of their own apart from those attributes that the plot requires of them. Hotaro is not like this. Even though he never puts any effort into anything (or so he claims), he is not someone who is solely acted upon by those around him. His rather dynamic attempts to avoid doing anything on top of his laconic wit make him an enjoyable character to watch. As much as I like Hyouka, there are some problems. While some of the mystery arcs are, to be frank, fantastic and some of the best mystery anime has to offer, a fair number of the one-off episodes are pretty dull and obvious from a mystery perspective. While they still entertain thanks to the shows strong cast and writing the show’s thematic strength and interest is so intrinsically tied to the mysteries it explores that I spent most of my time during those episodes waiting for them to end so I could get into the next multi-episode mystery. Overall Hyouka is a top-class show. It brings something new to the table in terms of mystery and it is well-written and beautifully realised. At least half to two thirds of this show is exceptional but sadly that remaining portion does drag it down to the point that I cannot give it my most enthusiastic endorsement. That said, I do recommend it.