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Kokuhaku - Confession is one of the biggest surprises I could ever expect among the hidden gems Japan reserves if we search through the unpublished stories. In fact, this one-shot is part of a forgotten production of both Nobuyuki Fukumoto, a storyteller which builds up twisted psychological characters, and Kaiji Kawaguchi, specialized into warfare comics like Eagle or Zipang. In this sense, the union of a rough realistic depiction and a creepy, thrilling plot.
Confession is the story of a couple of climbers who finds themselves in the middle of a snow storm. As soon as the older of the pair obtain a bad injury on ... his leg, he decides to tell his colleague a terrible secret, in order to die there without regrets. However, the weather gets immediately better, and with this new cognition the two protagonists starts a mouse and cat game in which paranoia plays a fundamental role. They both thinks about that precise moment, and both are ready to do everything for surviving or making the secret survive. Confession uses its single location in the best possible way. The cabin in which the two main characters are blocked is a labyrinth of rooms and hidden passages, of lights and shadows, while the snow lashes the external zones. The ability of the two authors in making us in doubt since the start towards the destiny of our leads is awesome, and the amount of details, the emotional expressions of the faces, dirtied and cooked by the low temperature. This whole artistic achievement is possible thanks to a cinematographic vision of the whole storytelling, making me think why there isn't an adaptation of this story, with all its surprises and sudden turnings!

Confession is one of the most underestimated mangas I can think about, full of perspectives on the cinematographic potential of this media. A plot moved by remorse, with the necessity of finding peace and at the same time escaping from every form of judgement. In this way, a simple cabin becomes an arena in which surviving becomes more and more difficult. A twisted narrative makes the pair with a squared, rough and gritty amount of character designs and artistic features, with an ending more actual than ever.

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World- it's truly the strangest isekai I have ever seen. We are not talking about a normal production with a straightforward plot and some excellent twists. We are focusing our attention on a difficult fantasy Anime, with the objective of surprise the viewer in every moment using every way of pure entertainment. Starting from absurd characters in order to add constantly new elements we could discover how the imaginary of Re:Zero could be interesting and inexplicable at the same time, creating a great amount of sidestories. The author seems undecided during the whole series because of the variety of narrative ... arches without an ending, with lots of moment of the anime strangely disconnected with the rest of the screenplay.

At the beginning we immediately familiarize with the protagonists of Re:Zero, discovering Subaru's powers and Emilia's relational problems, following a stupid and useless development of their state of mind. In fact, this element turns an interesting action anime in something more dramatic and linked with love. Fortunately, Re:Zero doesn't commit the same errors of Sword Art Online, and for this reason we have a development of the scenes and character's choices enjoyable and very original, coming to an end which choose to close one of the last problems showed to Subaru.

The technical sectors of the Anime succeed in their purposes, with lots of good animations and a modern soundtrack perfect for Re:Zero. For this reason it is disappointing that lots of scenes are made with superficiality, turning the characters in disturbing versions of themselves. We are not talking about art style choices, when it's evident the presence of these errors. Obviously these problems don't undermine the quality of the product, but I was hoping for a cure for details linked with the amount of secrets and variable choices we talked about previously.

To sum up, Re:Zero is an entertaining anime with lots of good ideas all inserted into the same screenplay, next to a nice art style and OST with too many inaccuracies. The whole first part of Subaru's adventure is something new in the anime industry, with the same problems of all the isekais of modern times. A breath of fresh air with the aftertaste of the same old formula. Original and difficult to follow, Re:Zero first season creates lots of questions without answering them all, in an exaggerated way.