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High school sophomore Aya Iseshima was on her way to school one day, alongside her peppy best friend Natsume, when they happened upon a strange sight; A shrine maiden named Miko was engaged in a dramatic battle with a flight attendant, right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight, throwing each other into car windows and punching each other’s clothing to shreds. Deciding to step in, Aya both sides with and befriends the shrine maiden, inadvertently taking her place in an underground martial arts tournament called the Platonic Heart. The winner of this tournament would be granted one wish upon completion, and when ... her new friend suddenly disappears without a trace, Aya embarks on a string of deadly battles to work her way through the tournament to find poor Miko. Unfortunately for her, literally nothing about this situation is as it seems.

Zettai Shougeki: Platonic Heart... Or, Master of Martial Hearts, as it’s known in the west, because a terrible pun legitimately sounded better than the original title... was produced by Studio Kikan, now known as St. Signpost, and I’m kind of at a loss here because I’ve never actually seen any other title from their catalogue. I had previously heard rumors that it was produced by Studio Arms, which would have made sense given the litany of hentai attached to them, but nope. Kikan. But hey, that should tell you all about the production values of this series. It looks like swill from a company that has dipped it’s fingers into way too many cream pies. As far as I can tell, that isn’t actually the case with Kikan, but I have nothing else to work with here.

Most anime with budget problems will save the best looking animation for their openings, because that’s often the first impression most people will have of any series, so the fact that even the opening features running animation that would barely qualify as the worst an average anime has to offer should be your first red flag. This anime is asshole ugly. The animation is cheap and stilted, using budget saving tricks at every opportunity without bothering(possibly due to simple inability) to hide them. The only remotely expensive looking visual in the entire series is the platonic heart itself, the glorious mcguffin everyone’s fighting for that often gets shown to us in an endlessly recycled rotation. It’s fully 3D rendered, it’s see-through, and its design is garish and tacky, just a crystal pretzel covered in smaller colored gems.

The characters proportions are inconsistent, they’re frequently off-model with their eyes rarely set right on their faces, and for a fanservice show, it’s stunningly unappealing. I think the kind of sexiness they were going for was the kind where you take a body part people want to see... T and A, obviously... And just find every attempt to shove those assets as far into the camera as they can, leaving the people attached to them in unnervingly awkward poses. Bare breasts look passable maybe a quarter of the time, but far more often than that they look like the kinds of really shoddy nude-filter fan edits you can find on Rule34 sites. The only half-way decent looking nude scene is a shower sequence in episode 2 that looks like it was stolen directly from Vampire Hunter D.

The fight scenes themselves are honestly kind of hilarious, not only in the logic behind them, but in the different ways they manage to rend the clothing of any given targeted area. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of anime where women punch and kick their opponents’ clothing to shreds, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where a bra is literally punched off, still in one piece, like the force of the impact somehow unhooked it. The backgrounds are lazy, the movement of extras is minimal at best, and the main character just makes the derpiest expressions whenever she feels the cardinal emotions of anger or despair.

It’s been a while since I talked about the opening theme of an anime, but lord this one stands out for all the wrong reasons. Every single episode starts off with the soothing melody of an electric guitar doing an impression of a fire alarm. I’m a pretty big fan of Kaidoku Funou by Jinn... It’s my favorite Code Geass opening, what with it’s Garbage-meets-The-Donnas aesthetic, but I know I’m in the minority. I’ve heard lots of people call it off-key, shrill and annoying, which means Tatsumaki Wave by Little Non is MY Kaidoku Funou. It sounds like Avril Lavigne trying to cover Britney Spears’ Toxic. The rest of the music isn’t much better, but I barely noticed it.

The English dub, I am sad to say, is annoyingly, disturbingly, distressingly, unforgivably... Good. Like it’s actually really good. Just about every Funimation regular is in this show, and they do a stellar job, especially Cherami Leigh, who is just an absolute champ at making the shrill Natsume as likeable as possible, and Monica Rial, who played against her usual type to make a pretentious sounding lore dump in the final episode(not even the worst of the episode) sound almost palatable. A sad exception is the main actor, who plays her role... I don’t want to say half-assedly, because it does sound like she’s trying her best, but more like half-heartedly, where there are moments where she genuinely sounds like she doesn’t want to be there. She works under an alias, as Anita Neukar, and while it’s usually not my policy to do so, I am going to respect her wishes on that.

Funimation has a weird history of giving some of their best possible effort to fanservice titty shows that do NOT deserve the attention, and this OVA is no exception. The actors put their all into reading their absurd and often repulsive dialogue, recreated faithfully but altered just enough so that the glut of awful Japanese puns will be accessible to English speakers, and I know I’m going to sound ungrateful for saying this, I’m kind of disappointed by that. If this show had come out a few years prior, and had found it’s way to the desk of ADV Films... Or a few years later, with Sentai Flmworks... I have no doubt in my mind that someone like notorious ADR director Stephen Foster could have given it the Ghost Stories treatment, albeit maybe on a smaller scale, just basing an entire dub around calling out it’s own material for how stupid and non-sensical it is.

But yeah, really good dub. Go figure.

So here’s what this show is, and this is probably the best description I can possibly give it. Let’s say you’re playing a table top RPG, similar to DND but in a modern setting. The DM says you each create your own female combatant character... Humans only, of course, but weird gimmicks are encouraged... Who will battle each other to the death in a series of one on one fights. Simple, intriguing idea, could be fun. Immediately after the game starts, however, he railroads the game and makes you the main character, placing you in literally every single fight except for the introductory one between another player character and his own DMPC. You fight all the other player characters, personally, and when you’re losing, DM gives you some BS power-up so you win anyway for the sake of his story. At the end, DM mercilessly dumps layers upon layers of cruel, soul crushing plot twists on you about the game and your character, and you just have to sit there, jaw dropping further and further to the floor, as he revels in his own delusional sense of depth.

The whole game just follows a bunch of edgelord murder hoboes calling out ridiculous attacks against each other while the ‘mastermind’ behind it all sets up fetish scenarios for each fight, saving every defeated player character to serve his own twisted, perverted endgame that none of their creators would have allowed given the choice. This anime reeks of poor planning and world building, revolving around a concept that could have worked if they spent any time trying to make sense out of it instead of focusing all their time in writing reveals, none of which were properly foreshadowed. It’s a secret tournament, but it takes place in broad daylight in the middle of the street. Combatants are putting their lives on the line for one perfect wish, but they shoot themselves in the feet by basing their entire combat styles on overly complicated gimmicks. Remember in my review of Key the Metal Idol, how I said it’s only glaring flaw was that it spent the majority of it’s feature-length penultimate episode lore dumping to explain the mystery to the viewer? I take it back. This show does the same thing, only far worse, and in far less time.

The only reason I could imagine anyone subjecting themselves to this cringe-fest... Aside from inviting some friends over and drinking until it’s funny, which I’ve done... Is for the uncensored nudity, which this show has in spades, outside of one indoor pool scene that stands as a lone, and very weird exception. My friends, it has often been said that I like boobs. My friends, I like boobs. Friends, I love boobs. I love when they’re bare, I love when they’re not covered by hair, steam or streams of light, and I absolutely hate it when uncensored manga are adapted into TV safe anime, sacrificing my beloved boobies in the process. I won’t deny that watching Master of Martial Hearts after watching an anime that constantly teased you with TV-safe nudity does create a favorable comparison for it... This show can be a serious palette cleanser after watching something like A Sister’s All You Need, Fire Force, or let’s just be honest here, pretty much anything by Hiro Mashima.

But you know what else could serve that particular esoteric purpose? A lot, actually. Even in a modern market where the inclusion of uncensored nudity in non-hentai anime is becoming less and less common for the sake of appealing more and more to the puritanical American market, there will always be options out there, and they will always be better than this crap. You could watch Highschool DXD, supplementing your fanservice with intense, suspenseful demonic action. You could watch Strike Witches, supplementing your fanservice with high-octane aerial combat and a cast of extremely likeable characters. You could watch A Centaur’s Life, and supplement your fanservice with smart social commentary and some of the ballsiest world-building I’ve ever seen. I know there’s a lot of horny 14 year olds who probably don’t have any self respect, and I’m saying this as someone who was once one of you... You deserve better.

Master of Martial Hearts is available from Funimation. I should warn you, they were so desperate to sell this puppy that they put fanart of three characters topless right in the inside cover of the DVD, do with that information what you will. It’s supposedly based on a video game of the same name, but I can’t find any proof that it actually existed, like, ever. That says a lot.

If Ikki Tousen were to have a baby with Fate Stay/Night, Master of Martial Hearts would be the afterbirth. It starts out bad, and it never gets better, oh no, quite the opposite. This series goes downhill faster and faster, leading up to an infamously rancid trainwreck of a conclusion that has to be seen to be believed. I don’t think this show is quite as bad as the worst anime I’ve ever seen... Which I’ve vowed to only ever refer to as “Name redacted” until the end of time... But that’s also probably because it’s only five episodes long, I can’t make any guarantees for how much more bafflingly heinous it would be if it were stretched out to a more standard 14 episode length. As it is, it’s more of a challenge than entertainment, something you survive rather than just watch. For literally anything that you think you can get out of it, just watch Highschool DXD. Trust me.

I give Master of Martial Hearts a 1 out of 10.

One day, a boy died unexpectedly, and since his death was unplanned, he wound up in front of a deity who offered him a chance at another life in a new world. He was granted one favor, and he used it to bring a presumably useful item with him, only for it to fall far short of it’s potential as he became an adventure, built up a harem of useless girls, and tried to survive in a fantasy world of unfamiliar magic.
If it sounds like I just rattled off the plot of Konosuba with all the interesting and funny parts taken out, well, yeah. ... That’s what this is. Not literally, but pretty much.
In Another World with my Smartphone, which I’m just going to be calling Smartphone from now on, was produced by Production Reed, a studio so obscure that I’m honestly surprised that I’ve mentioned them before. They were fairly prolific in previous decades, mostly sticking to obscure genre fare, but it seems like they’ve made efforts to produce more modern-style work for several years now. Smartphone is one of only six anime I can find credited to them since 2003, sporting a far more polished aesthetic than anything from their roots. Honestly, some of these titles look pretty good.
I mentioned in my Vampire Hunter D review that it looked passable despite having a low budget, and the same applies to Smartphone. There are cost-cutting tricks spread all over the series, but they’re only really noticeable when you’re looking for them, and they’re fairly unobtrusive. I’ve said before that I prefer cheap productions that managed their budget well over big, lavish productions throwing around Pixar level money, and while Smartphone’s animation isn’t anything revolutionary, it does what it has to do to stay smooth and consistent.
The character designs, as well, are more than serviceable. They’re easy on the eyes, although they’re also painfully generic. You’ve got the dark haired samurai girl, the outgoing loli, the rich blonde girl who brings up marriage way too fast, the twin sisters where(and stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the older sibling has longer hair and a more outgoing and dominant personality while the younger sibling has short hair and a more reserved and submissive personality. And, of course, you have the harem lead who looks pretty much the same as every other harem lead. Like I said, none of the characters are bad looking... I’m willing to bet they do just fine at pushing merchandise... But you’ve seen them all before.
The English dub is pretty solid, and it’s probably the best thing about the series. The actors blend into their characters so well that I find myself taking the presence of actors for granted, and that kind of speaks for itself. The only detail of note is that Josh Grelle spends most of his time just spouting generic harem-lead dialogue, asking questions, spouting exposition and just being blandly nice, but he suddenly goes way over the top any time his character has to show actual emotion. There are random moments of dialogue where he’ll basically take any excuse to over-act and give a melodramatic delivery. It’s like he spends most of his performance as a bent hose, just occasionally unwinding for bursts of personality at unpredictable intervals, and I kind of love that.
So, many years ago, I had a group of friends that liked going to movies together. It was our thing. When the first trailer for The Purge came out in 2013, of course they all wanted to go. I did too, kind of, but there was something about the premise that nagged at me. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize just how huge the concept it was presenting really was. One night where all crime was legal... The implications were horrifying. There are so many awful things people could do if given that kind of an opportunity, and this movie was using it as a cheap excuse for why the cops aren’t called during a home invasion story. In a wide release American movie.
Don’t get me wrong, they portrayed some stuff. Looting, murder, property damage. But the true extent of that concept was too gruesome, soo dark, and way too consequential for a major studio to ever stake it’s reputation on. What about arson? Entire neighborhoods burning to the ground, all because of some random dude with a rag and a lighter? Or not even a random dude, but the KKK burning down minority neighborhoods? What about animal abuse, or all the unspeakable things parents and like-minded adults could do to children? There would be long term planning involved with a lot of this. I dunno, maybe the sequels addressed some of this shit, but at the time I had no faith that an American movie with that kind of backing could ever go as far as it needed to go to do such a terrifying idea justice.
Why am I bringing up The Purge, you ask? Because there were multiple points during Smartphone where I found myself saying, “You know, at least The Purge had an excuse.”
The concept of an isekai protagonist bringing a working smart phone into a magical world with him is an inherently creative idea. Much like The Purge, it happens to carry a ton of implications and possibilities. Off the top of my head, maybe he looks up the news about his death? Maybe he looks up his family and friends on social media to see what they’re saying about him, and how they’re dealing with his loss? Hell, he’s fifteen, I’m sure his parents would have a lot to say. Imagine him alone in some scene, reading his mother’s heartfelt facebook post about him while he tears up silently in the night.
Or how about people see the mysterious artifact and accuse him of using arcane or demonic magic? Maybe people see how much he’s able to do with it, and they instantly distrust him? Or maybe somebody steals it, and becomes corrupted in some way by the knowledge they find on it? Maybe he can download movies to show his new friends? Or they become addicted to some weird games on it?
They don’t do anything I just mentioned. Literally none of it. Throughout the series, he only has two uses for his smartphone that stand out to me; He looks up how to make some things, an he takes some pictures. That’s it. He also uses it to enhance his magic in some scenes, but the magic itself is far more memorable in every instance. Hell, the fact that he has unprecedented access to all forms of magic FAR outweighs his actual smartphone usage by a substantial margin. That is not how you should use a gimmick that you based the title of your series on. Probably worst of all is the fact that pretty much everything he does with it SHOULD still be revolutionary and world-changing, but the biggest reaction he ever gets from anybody is along the lines of “That’s so cool!” or “Would you look at that...”
And the lack of imagination goes a lot deeper than just the premise. I made a brief comparison to Konosuba at the start of this review, which might have made some of you cringe, but the two shows are somewhat similar. In Smartphone, we open with the protag already in front of God, being told that he died. He’s surprisingly cool with it. God lets him go to a new world, and he gives him a ton of convenient advantages to help him survive there. This scene technically works, as it does set up the premise, at least in a bare-bones sense, but all we learn outside of that is that Touya has no real personality, and God apparently has rules he has to follow. Somehow.
Compare that to Konosuba. We see Kazuma’s previous life, his pathetic death, and an entirely unique scene where he’s mocked by the deity he meets in the afterlife, so he gets back at her by dragging her into a new world with him. This opening is brimming with personality and humor. Rather than just set up the plot and introduce a couple characters, like Smartphone, it lets you know right off the bat what kind of people the two leads are, just how mean-spirited and diabolical the show’s sense of humor is going to be, and even the fact that you’ll probably never feel guilty for laughing at it. The dynamic between Kazuma and Aqua is so unique and hysterical that you immediately crave more of it.
I’m not going to go into all of the characters... I implied how generic they were when I discussed their designs, and they’re pretty much the exact characters you’d expect them to be, at least down to the lowest common denominator. You never learn literally anything about Touya throughout the series, and the girls are all madly in love with him and(aside from the twins) have no unique dynamic with each other outside of being each other’s competition. I could talk about the world they inhabit, but honestly, there’s nothing special about that, either. It’s just your typical fantasy RPG world.
There are attempts at world building, but little of it matters in the long run. Not long after Touya arrives, for example, a passing noble obsessively offers to buy his strange, otherworldly clothes. This is a good building block for future development, as well as a convenient way to get some currency in the protag’s pockets, but it never really comes back, and it’s undermined several episodes later by a beach episode where everyone just conveniently has normal, modern-day bikinis. Similarly, the fact that Touya had to invent ice cream was also an inspired idea, but it feels weird that they already had cake, and all the ingredients for ice cream just happened to conveniently exist. This also doesn’t really go anywhere. Hey, remember the massive impact flavored burgers had on the world of Log Horizon? Good times. The invention of bikes also fails to really make an impact.
Look, an isekai anime doesn’t necessarily need a strong cast, and it doesn’t necessarily need a strong world, but it should at least have one of those things. Konosuba’s fantasy world was honestly kind of generic, pretty much on par with Smartphone’s, but it didn’t matter because of how strong the characters were. You put Aqua and Kazuma in any environment, it’s gonna be entertaining. On the other side of the coin, the main cast of 12 Kingdoms wasn’t much to write home about, but it didn’t matter because the world it sent them to was unique, complex and full of breathtaking details. Smartphone doesn’t have a strong cast of characters OR a strong world, so the only chance it has left is if it takes a page out of Escaflowne’s book and bets all of its chips on the power of its writing. So, how IS Smartphone’s plot and story?
Well, let me put it like this. I was not surprised to find out this show was based on a light novel. Most isekai are. Most shows with annoyingly long titles, as well. I’m not a huge fan of light novels in general, as even the best one I’ve read made abridged novels look complex in comparison, and while most adaptations of the like are able to elevate the material above it’s source through careful execution, Smartphone wasn’t even your typical light novel. It was self-published online, and didn’t get picked up professionally until it got popular, implying that a good chunk of the early material operated under less revision, feedback and professional criticism than most other light novels.
The writing in a typical light novel is bare bones at best... You get conversations, things happening, more conversations, brief exposition and more conversations as the story quickly moves from moment to moment, never really attempting to build up any sense of mood or emotion for any given scene. In a typical novel, if a character faces their greatest fear, the narrative would place you in their shoes and force you to feel the tension and terror they’re experiencing. In a light novel, you’re told what the situation is, you’re told it’s their greatest fear, and you see the actions they take to get through it. Like I said, not terribly complex. I’m sure there’ are people out there who love light novels, that’s fine, they’re just not for me.
Unfortunately, this is how Smartphone feels most of the time. Much like a light novel, it’s all text and no technique. Character goes here. Character says this. Character wins fight. There are no quiet moments. There’s no time for character development. Major events go by at such a break neck speed that you’re given no real reason to care about them. The perfect example of this is in episode two, where Touya meets a duke, and uses his magic to heal the duke’s blind wife. Now that should be pretty impactful, right? A woman who hasn’t seen in five years, finally opens her eyes to embrace her husband and child as they cry in joy. This could easily take up half an episode, introducing the issue, getting us invested, setting up tension, establishing some kind of doubt and then inflicting massive feels with the payoff, right? Wrong.
This entire sequence takes two minutes. I counted. The Duke mentions his blind wife. Touya’s friends realize he can heal her. We see her for literally the first time. He heals her, and I swear to God, they try to make a tear-jerking moment out of this. They try to make you cry over a woman you just met, whose illness you immediately knew was going to be cured, taking no time whatsoever to actually earn the emotional reaction they wanted. The entire series is like this. There’s no plot, Touya’s not trying to accomplish anything, you’re never given any reason to feel anything, and every single threat or obstacle the main cast faces is overcome in the time it takes you to say “Well that was fucking easy.” A conflict arises, Touya has a solution for it, they move onto the next thing.
There is no danger. There is no threat. There are no stakes. Nothing is ever allowed to have any weight or gravity. There was honestly only one moment in the entire show where I was able to feel anything other than bewilderment; Touya is decisively the most powerful person in the world, having more magical aptitude than anyone else alive(and a smartphone too I guess) and he faces no real opposition, so what does he do? He uses his magic, and instructions from the internet, to make guns. Because he really needs extra power. And then he turns around and gives two guns to two of his waifus, both of whom are still children, neither of whom have had any firearms safety training, neither of whom have any idea what guns even are. The fact that they didn’t wind up accidentally killing anybody is a true miracle.
The only thing I could see even resembling a plot thread was the question of who Touya would wind up with, but even that means nothing. He has no preference whatsoever out of his harem, he never shows any explicit signs of attraction to anybody, and he only kisses a few of them because they ask him to. He approaches his harem with all the enthusiasm of Sousuke Sagura, to the point that he might as well be choosing a soft drink instead of a romantic partner. This plot thread is resolved... Kind of... In what has to be the single dumbest way for a harem storyline to possibly be resolved. I’m not going to say what happens, but it didn’t work in Cat Planet Cuties, and it doesn’t work here.
So at the end of the day we have an isekai anime with a promising gimmick that it refuses to explore, no sense of identity or personality, no sense of stakes or suspense, a clear sense of humor but with absolutely terrible comedic timing, no real surprises, no imagination, no creativity, and nothing interesting to set it apart from the absolute glut of anime about high schoolers being abruptly transported to another world. Yes, I said transported, not ‘reincarnated,’ because very few of these titles involve actual reincarnation, and this is not one of them. I don’t even think the uncensored version of To Love Ru was as disappointing as this crap.
I‘ll give it credit that it’s a fairly inoffensive show, and it’s not unpleasant to watch, so I guess I could see it being someone’s comfy show, and if that’s what it is to you, who am I to argue? My favorite part of the Kingdom Hearts franchise was the opening two hours of Kingdom Hearts 2, and that’s a terrible opinion to have. But I get it. Boring stuff can be a source of uncomplicated comfort. If this series is your chicken soup when you’re sick in bed, I understand. (Then again, I caught covid when I tried to rewatch it for this review back in March, and it sure as hell didn’t do anything for me when I was delirious with fever, so what do I know.) For anyone else, though, this show has just as much substance to it as 12 episodes of uninterrupted static.
In Another World with my Smartphone is available from Sentai Filmworks, and can be streamed on Crunchyroll. A second season has recently been announced, and while the exact release date is unknown, apparently Touya’s gonna get a bunch of new robot waifus, or something? Whatever. The Light Novel is available stateside from J-Novel Club, and a manga adaptation is available by Yen Press.
So after years away from the anime reviewing scene, why come out of retirement for this? Well, simply put, I sometimes watch an anime and have so many thoughts about it that I can’t get it out of my head without writing it all down and making a thing out of it. That’s why I wrote my review of Serial Experiments Lane last year, and now, here we are. I’m not sure why this was the title that lit a fire under me. It’s by no means the worst anime I’ve ever seen. It didn’t piss me off or offend me. It wasn’t painfully cringey or tasteless. Honestly, on my first viewing, it wasn’t boring either. I actually found myself engaged not in the plot, setting or characters, but in seeing all of the fascinating ways that it failed at basic storytelling. It’s probably the worst isekai anime I’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely the most nothing anime I’ve ever seen, which is why I’m going to give In Another World With My Smartphone a 2/10.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you may have heard of Chisa Yomoda, a middle school student who committed suicide by throwing herself off the roof of a tall building in a seedy downtown area of suburban Japan. If you’re like Lain, a quiet, introverted girl who rarely has a word to say to anyone, you may not have heard about what happened until a week later, when her classmates began to receive mysterious emails from the deceased student. Checking her email on her seldom used Navi, Lain discovers that not only has she received an email as well, but it openly ... references the rumors that have spread since the other emails went out, implying this is more than just a one off prank.

Intrigued, Lain convinces her IT savvy father to upgrade her out of date Navi, and she begins to explore the Wired, a world-wide communication tool that Chisa’s email claimed she’d abandoned the living world to ascend to, almost like it was another plane of existence rather than a bunch of ones and zeroes being transmitted between satellites. As Lain delves further and further into the technological rabbit hole, the lines between reality and the wired continue to blur, and the bodies keep piling up in it’s wake. Will Lain be able to discover the truth behind this strange alternate reality? And if she does, will it be the reality she wants to find, or will the revelations regarding her own life become too devastating to bear?

Serial experiments Lain was produced by Triangle staff, and if you haven’t heard of them, well, I honestly can’t blame you. They’ve released a few titles I’ve heard of, like Magic Users Club and Macross Plus, but Lain is by far the most famous work that they produced before they folded in 2002. The most recognizable thing about their history is actually the fact that they splintered off from Madhouse, and that does kind of fit in with Lain’s visual style, but they split off way back in 1987, so any actual stylistic connection between the two feels incidental at best.

What’s more understandable about Lain in particular is that it’s director was the late Ryutaro Nakamura, and more importantly, it was written by Chiaki Konaka, who worked with Nakamura on Ghost Hound and has a noteworthy taste for dark and psychological subject matter, as his contributions to the Digimon and Cthulhu universes should prove. Much like in Ghost Hound, Nakamura’s visual style and direction is the perfect match for Konaka’s writing, at least on paper. They were, at the very least, on the same page creatively. However, like in Ghost Hound, there’s a noticeable disparity in the animation and art quality. Since Ghost hound came out nearly a decade later and had a much better studio behind it, the divide between normal human animation and the trippy surreal animation was distinct, but both still looked good.

In Lain however, this is far from the case. The surreal animation is outstanding, truly ground breaking stuff. It plays primarily with static, focus and matrix-like 3D elements, and the ways it uses color turns just about every shadow into a portal to some outerspace pocket dimension dripping with blood-red plasma. The more normal, every day animation just looks bad. Characters are constantly off model, they barely move or even blink when they’re not the ones talking in frame, and frankly, I’ve seen better drawn faces in hentai doujin. It’s pretty obvious that one had to be sacrificed to protect the budget of the other, and it says a lot about the priorities of the series, but more on that in a minute.

For the most part, the music ties in directly to the visuals, more to enhance their surreal nature than to stand out on their own, so they’re pretty easy to forget. The exception to this is when composer Reichi Nakado, a professional musician in his own right, was able to shine through with his own rock and roll roots, including one really lengthy sequence that’s basically just an extended guitar solo. It’s a strong, but mostly forgettable soundtrack. The opening, however, is my favorite part of the series. The soulful song Duvet was performed by british indie rock group Boa, and while the lyrics seem largely inconsequential to the series, the song fits well with the visual of Lain wandering aimlessly through an empty town as she peeks in at people through their TVs. As for the ending, well, it’s basically just an extended shot of 14-year-old Lain naked on the floor next to some wires. I get the symbolism behind this... You generally show a character in such a position when referencing either birth or rebirth, so the idea of Lain being reborn through technology is there, but lingering on that one shot for over a minute and a half is kind of creepy and uncomfortable, honestly.

The english is dub kind of similar to the soundtrack, as it’s definitely strong and substantial, but it’s mostly forgettable as everyone fits into their roles and does their job to tell the story. Kirk Thornton has a pretty difficult job playing Masami Eiri, someone who’s more of a babbling mouthpiece than an actual character, and he does his best to make his edgelord monologues palatable. Actors like Jamieson Price, Patricia Ja Lee, Lia Sargent and Brianne Siddall perform their roles to perfection, but they’re really only there to act as hypemen for the real star of the show, Bridget Hoffman, who had to play multiple different sides of the main character while still sounding like the same girl, and she absolutely slayed it. It’s a strong dub all around, but it is absolutely HER vehicle.

Now, anime is no stranger to surrealism. Honestly, it’s probably the best medium FOR that genre. Don’t get me wrong, people like Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch can do amazing things with live action movies, but no other medium is more perfectly geared towards it than anime. Animation is already rife with possibilities, and there are western cartoons that have experimented with obscure styles and dense visual metaphors, but the western world also sees animation as mostly a tool for either children’s entertainment or crass, immature adult entertainment. Japan, on the other hand, uses animation to reach a variety of different demographics, so there are far less restrictions in place to limit the imaginations of it’s creative minds.

There’s also several ways that surrealism in anime can be used. The first name that should come to you when the subject is brought up will naturally be Satoshi Kon, and good. It absolutely should. He had a tendency to use surrealist visuals and concepts to explore the themes of his work, normally after establishing the world, characters and internal logic before gleefully breaking all three of them. The second should be Kunihiko Ikuhara, and again, good. Ikuhara had a lot to say about maturity, gender roles and sexuality, and his work has always been extremely dense with symbolism and avant-garde ideas to the point that understanding what he’s saying drastically alters your viewing experience, but as more of a lateral move than an actual improvement. And then you have works that just plunge you into a strange, surreal world and expect you to still be breathing on the other side.

Two of my favorite surrealist anime are Revolutionary Girl Utena and Cat Soup, both of which I’ve reviewed in the past, and while I didn’t go into any heavy spoilers, I do believe I did a pretty good job explaining some element of what they were trying to say. I also enjoy quite a few Satoshi Kon works, but aside from Tokyo Godfathers, whose narrative I felt was a bit weak before I started piecing things together, I haven’t even bothered trying to work out all of the intricacies, because their narratives are usually perfectly concise and coherent regardless of how weird they get. So, because I have some passing familiarity with anime surrealism, and I have at least a rudimentary ability to analyze them, I should be able to come to a decisive opinion regarding Serial Experiments Lain, right? Well, let’s dive in and see where this show lands on the surrealist spectrum.

To start, one of the stranger things about Lain is that it’s already using trippy visuals right at the beginning of the story. In most cases, an anime would save it’s surrealist visuals for a little later on, letting you get used to its version of the normal world before things started to get weird, so the difference in setting can feel more striking. When we’re introduced to Lain, after a gaudy sequence leading up to Chisa’s suicide, she’s already walking past shadows and power lines that look like they had more artistic effort put into them than she did. She’s already having trouble focusing on the board in class, causing letters her teacher is writing to go in and out of focus before Chisa’s death, which by the way happened a week prior, was even brought up to her. This could have worked, if what they were going for was some late game twist that Lain was dealing with a mental illness from the start and most of the events of the story were only happening in her delusional mind, but I don’t think they were.

To figure out what they were going for, we’ll need to figure out what the plot is, but I don’t think the inciting incident is ever made clear. Yoiu could say it’s a mystery surrounding Chisa Yomoda’s suicide, but that whole sub plot feels like more of a McGuffin to get Lain interested in the Wired than anything else. To try and decipher this, I’m going to have to set all the trippy imagery aside and instead look at a literal interpretation of the events of the first few episodes. A girl kills herself, and apparently starts sending out emails to her classmates. A week later, Lain discovers this, checks her email, and somehow develops an interest in computers. She immediately starts hearing about some doppleganger doing things she doesn’t remember doing, and the classmates who told her about the emails invite her out to a night club, where... As soon as she gets there... Some boy who previously ingested some kind of microchip drug starts shooting people, and kills himself right in front of her. Lain is sent one of those drug chips soon afterwards, and tries to figure out what it is.

Okay, great, is that the inciting incident? The mystery regarding the microchip? No, because we already know what it is and what it does. Before the shooting, we were told... Yes, I mean that literally, the story stopped dead in it’s tracks to tell the viewer... What it was, and what it did. But the chip is barely brought up after this. It gives the men in black a reason to spy on her, and it gives her a reason to interrogate someone for answers later on, but it’s otherwise unimportant, and you know what? That’s how a lot of things work in this show. Just about every potentially interesting element that gets introduced is just meant to advance the story to it’s next potentially important element. This happens with Chisa’s suicide, with her emails, with the chip, with the Knights, hell, even a ghostly image of Lain in the clouds doesn’t leave a lasting impact on the story. I guess you could just call this a slow burn of a mystery, but what’s at stake? What’s so important about solving that mystery?

Well, there’s Lain’s doppleganger, who threatens to ruin her reputation and tear her new friends away from her, but that feels more like a ‘stop looking into this’ kind of threat. The only thing that really remains important throughout the story is the Wired, but what exactly IS the Wired? Conventional wisdom would be to say that it’s basically the internet, but it doesn’t work the same way the internet works. Sure, it sends and receives email, but actual depictions of what it is and how it’s used are pretty scarce. From what little I remember seeing, it’s some kind of social area where people can connect to communicate, which is represented visually through people embodying avatars in some strange pocket dimension. This could just be an artistic interpretation of what’s actually happening, but we don’t see people huddled over computers while using it. We see people walking around in virtual reality headsets, or staring at a screen in a trance while talking disconnectedly to some invisible companion.

I don’t think there’s any direct analogue for this in our world, but I guess the best comparison I can make would be to say that it’s like an SAO full-dive version of VR chat, but instead of Ugandan Knuckles, you have the knights using disembodied lips to tell you that Lain is da queen, and you do not know de way. We learn way more about how the Wired came to be and what it’s doing to Lain than we ever do about what the Wired is. There’s an entire episode where they stop the story dead in it’s tracks five entire times to give you an American history lesson, drawing a decades long through-line between Roswell, Area 51, MJ12 and the Schumann resonance... Some of which is factual, some of which is based on old conspiracy theories... Until it eventually diverges into a fictitious Japanese guy using the Wired to try and start the Human Instrumentality Project. Keep in mind, this same episode featured a little grey alien in a Freddy Krueger shirt peeking in on people, which Lain is later accused of doing(she is literally accused of discovering Arisu’s deepest secret and spreading it, but I’m pretty sure HOW she allegedly did any of this is never explained, at least not in a way that Arisu or anybody else could believably buy into) and this is all happens after a previous episode where Lain interrogates an old German man who ran psychic experiments on children.

Okay, so the plot is hard to follow, that’s nothing new, but what is the series trying to say? I actually think I have this one in the bag. Throughout the story, people get sucked into the Wired, and the lines between that reality and their original one become so blurred that they kill themselves to jump into it, because they don’t need their fleshy bodies holding them back anymore. It also creates alternate versions of Lain that get her into trouble and threaten her personal life and attachments. This is clearly intended to be a cautionary tale about a technology that was still brand new in the Pre-Y2K time period that she show was made. It’s warning that the internet could become a tempting market substitute for reality, and could even lead to people developing split personalities and suicidal tendencies as a result.

There are two problems with this. First of all, that didn’t happen. Sure, there have probably been a few outlying cases involving people already dealing with mental illness issues in the first place, but the idea that people could abandon the real world for a virutal one to the degree this anime claims has become such a tired and cliched joke by the year 2020 that it almost looks adorable in retrospect. Don’t get me wrong, the internet has claimed a huge place in the modern world, to the point that social media has largely replaced in-person socializing, but mankind has mostly adapted to it’s presence and compartmentalized it to a mostly harmless place where the only thing about it that can really cause suicide on a noteworthy level is cyber-bullying. Also, the idea that you’re a different person from the version of you that exists on the internet just sounds like a lazy excuse for shitty behavior.

The other problem is that almost everything else that happens in the story... Aliens, government agents, microchip drugs, conspiracies, the works... Almost feels like window dressing that Chiaki Konaka used to make his message sound more profound and deep than it actually was, because instead of him just telling you what his paranoid, delusional fears for the future of mankind were, he buried it in edgy surreal nonsense, almost like he wrote an essay and then cut it up into a jigsaw puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s some solid backstory to everything going on in the series. There has to be some intricate way everything’s connected, and I’m willing to bet Konaka spent hours obsessively slaving over it to make it as airtight as possible, because Lain reeks of genuine effort like the passion project that it obviously was. If you’ve pieced it all together, or if someone else has, I’d love to hear about it, but I’m never going to figure it out for myself, and the reason for that is that I don’t care.

I love analyzing surrealist anime. I enjoy coming back to them and discovering some new element every time I do, which is why I hold shows like Utena and Madoka Magika in such high regard, and why Cat Soup is one of my favorite movies of all time. The reason those shows keep pulling me back in but Lain doesn’t is pretty simple: Lain gives me nothing to care about. There’s no plot, there’s no stakes, but most importantly of all, there’s almost no characters. The only people I give a crap about are Lain’s sister, who was the only character in the show who had realistic or relatable reactions to all the weird shit going on around her up until she went comatose halfway through the story, and Arisu(I am NOT going to call her Alice), who was the only character who seemed to genuinely care about Lain as a person.

And then there’s Lain herself, who is little more than a vehicle for the writer to explore his concepts through. She has no personality. Everything about her that should make a main character compelling, from her wants and needs to her arc and development, is designed specifically to revolve around the Wired, so Konaka can use it as a metaphor for the early internet. I have no idea why she pursued the Wired as fervently as she did, and I’m pretty sure in order to figure it out, I’d have to piece the show’s lore together to discover that she was some kind of psychic homunculous created by the German scientist to find that one Japanese guy who’s posing as God in the Wired and ascend to kill and replace him. The only thing I can really grasp about her as a person that’s at least kind of compelling is that she’s depressed about her neglectful family, and that does extend a bit farther into why she’d form such a strong attachment to Arisu, and that’s all great, but it’s still pretty bare bones when we’re talking about the development of a main character.

I’m totally fine with anime having deep, complex meaning and conveying some political or social message, but there has to be something else there that’s worth getting invested in. I don’t analyze Utena because I want to know what Ikuhara’s saying, I do it because I care about Utena, Anthy and all of their amazingly written costars. I don’t binge Cat Soup over and over again because it explores the conflict between family and religious values, I do it because of the little boy cat trying to save his big sister cat. All of the depth these pieces of media have is just icing on the cake, with the cake being stories and characters I love and identify with. Depth is great, but unless you’re given a reason to care, it can never become poignant. I didn’t mention it before, but there’s another way surrealism can be used in a narrative. You can use it as a distraction from content that’s not strong enough to stand on it’s own. There’s a LOT of anime that do this, from Haruhi Suzumiya using it to keep viewers from falling asleep during it’s endless philosophoical monologues to... Well, pretty much anything directed by Akiyuki Shinbou, for better or worse.

This can be done well, but most of the time, it’s done to make material come off as smarter, deeper and more complex than it actually is. It’s hard to call a popular anime pretentious without getting called out for ‘just not understanding it,’ but when Lain starts devolving into edgelord monologues claiming there’s no God outside of the internet and using condescending words like “Merely,” it’s hard to take anything it’s saying seriously, and that’s before it decides to go the route of a heavily cliched style of ending... We’ll call it a Jesus ending, as that’s the least spoiler-y thing I can call it... Which is something that I will freely admit I’m personally biased against. I don’t even like it when it’s done well. Madoka Magika had an ending that was kind of similar, and even though it works perfectly in context, it’s still my least favorite part of the series. At least I cared about Madoka.

All of this leaves Serial Experiemnts Lain as an anime that’s more style than substance, more tell than show, more convoluted than complex, and more falsely prophetic than emotionally resonant. The only genuine emotion it manages to convey is the occasional fear of a character in danger, and the constant confusion of the viewer. I can marathon six episodes in a row, then turn on a random youtube video and forget almost everything I just saw. As I said before, it does seem like the people making it genuinely cared about it, and it doesn’t seem the least bit lazy or half assed. On the contrary, they truly believed they had something to say, and they poured their hearts and souls into saying it, but by focusing more on making the show look deep than on giving it any actual depth, they missed the mark pretty hard. I respect it for it’s creativity and ambition, but unless you’re looking for something trippy to watch while stoned, I can’t recommend it.

I give Serial Experiments Lain a 4/10.

The world of competitive figure skating can be a harsh one indeed. That’s not to say the competition is cut throat or anything... Hell, the atmosphere between competitors seems to be downright friendly. On the contrary, the strain it puts on your body and mind can be absolutely brutal, as Japanese prodigy Yuuri Katsuki finds out after suffering a crushing defeat in the Grand Prix Finale. Already plagued by anxiety and self confidence issues, the downtrodden skater disappeared from the sport, looking to find himself, but eventually giving up and going home. All looked lost for the dejected and now portly 23 year old until ... a video of him skating the legendary routine of his idol Victor Nikiforov, and when it manages to catch the champion’s attention, Yuuri’s world is turned upside down when Victor shows up at his home and demands to become his coach and help him to realize his true potential. Unfortunately, Victor isn’t the only one taking an interest in him, as the international media comes knocking, and a fiery young rival decides to challenge him for Victor’s tutelage. Will Yuuri be able to realize his dream, or has his career been put on ice for good?

When I first started watching Yuri on Ice, I was honestly surprised that it didn’t have any strong connections to Studio Bones, as certain elements of the visual style seemed really close to some of that studio’s more goofy comedic work, like Soul Eater and the two Fullmetal Alchemist series. It was actually animated by a studio called MAPPA, or Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association, which was founded in 2011 and released it’s first title in 2012, and which was created by former members of Studio Madhouse. Now that I know that, I do kind of see it in a lot of the show’s more serious moments, but the fast paced comedic moments are still such a dead ringer for FMA that I can’t help but think it was at least partially inspired by it. Granted, this may just be because the animation style and visual direction feels really loose and experimental in the first episode, where it feels uncannily like they were still trying to figure out what the visual aesthetic should even be.

Whatever the case, I’m glad they were able to nail down a solid direction before episode two, because beyond that sort-of-messy first impression, the series is absolutely gorgeous. The fluidity of motion isn’t exactly consistent, as there’s a very clear divide between the content that had a lot of money poured into it and the content that didn’t, but despite this, it never allows itself to look bad. One of the tactics MAPPA uses to achieve this is going through the cheaper scenes via some really fast editing, using short cuts to keep your eyes from ever getting bored, although this does come with the drawback that at times, the story can move a little too fast. There are quite a few transitions, and even some entire scenes, that fly by almost quickly enough to give you whiplash, especially in the first episode. Thankfully, the scenes we rush into are usually fun and memorable enough to justify whatever we might have lost getting there, so it’s really not that big a deal in the long run.

But as far as the animation goes, the one thing everyone seems to remember the most strongly is the animation of the skating routines. Whenever someone steps out onto the ice in this series, the animation changes, at least for that character, so something that feels like a cross between rotoscoping, and the 3D dance animation from shows like Love Live. Now, both of these animation styles on their own have their pros and cons, but Yuri on Ice really does seem to combine the best of both worlds, as long as you’re not concentrating too hard on the characters faces, and the routines look absolutely beautiful as a result. Not only does it look amazing, but it seems to also capture the feel of performing, and of being in the spotlight to showcase everything you have in front of millions of screaming onlookers, almost as if you’ve transcended humanity itself for one fleeting moment that you’re able to shine. It’s as if the characters performing on the ice are in another world, and the rest of us are just living in it, which unfortunately does lead me into my only real complaint about the visuals.

Well, specifically, it’s a complaint I have with the character design department. When we catch up with Yuuri in the beginning of the series, he’s gained a considerable amount of weight in his off time, which creates a weird inconsistency with his actual weight. His gut seems to be working via ecchi boob physics, as it’s about three times larger when unclothed, which wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t also create an inconsistency in the story. Upon becoming Yuuri’s coach, Victor insists on making Yuuri lose weight so he can skate properly, but wasn’t Yuuri still fat when he inadvertently got filmed dancing the routine that caught Victor’s eye in the first place? Yeah, for that first routine scene, his girth suddenly disappears from both his gut and even his face as he performs, which alludes to the ‘feel of performing’ idea that I brought up earlier, but that kind of inconsistency should stay psychological, and not creep into the physical world of the story. Aside from that, the character designs are still more or less fine, with skater characters being designed as wonderfully flamboyant and sporting realistic-looking physiques, and outsiders generally taking on more cartoony looks.

Also, does anyone else really want to try a pork cutlet bowl now? They just make them look so freaking good. Sorry, moving on.

Being that this is a story about ice skating, you’d expect there to be a very high bar to pass in regard to the soundtrack, and good God does Yuri on Ice deliver on that front. I wish I could go into explicit detail about the plethora of beautiful tracks that are featured, but my research had unfortunately refused to bear fruit. Aside from covers, I can’t seem to find any of the actual music on youtube, and outside of a thirty-seven dollar physical CD, I can’t find the soundtrack on Amazon either, so I’m going to have to work off of memory when I tell you just how amazing the compositions are. I don’t know how much(if any) of it came from the public domain, or if it was all original, but not one of these tracks felt out of place in the setting, and they matched the characters dancing to them exquisitely. My favorite tracks that I can remember would have to be the classic rock inspired tune that Kenjiro Minami uses, and Love Eros, the salsa-esque tune that inspires Yuuri to finally discover and define his sexuality.

If there’s one piece of music in the series that I’ll probably never forget, it’s the opening, History Makers, which is easily one of my top ten favorite opening themes of all time. The song is performed in English, but despite being an original piece for the anime, it doesn’t sound even remotely Engrish. It’s performed by Japanese megastar Dean Fujioka, who not only wrote the song in perfectly coherent English, but he belts it out with all the power of Freddy Mercury, who I’d bet was a major inspiration for the piece. The ending theme is called YOLO(Yeah, I know that’s not actually the title, but somebody had to point out the connection), and unlike the opening, it’s only partially sung in English, with the music being EDM. I’m not a fan of this one, but it’s okay. It’s also worth noting that several insert songs that previously had Japanese lyrics have been translated by the dubbing team, and while most of them range from good to all right, the dubbed version of JJ’s theme is a bit on the cringey side.

Speaking of the English dub, it’s clear that Funimation knew they had something special on their hands, because they pampered the fuck out of it. They gave directorial duties to Sonny Strait, who’s always been a smart and responsible choice, and he churned out a translation that was both respectful and accessible. Starting with the main cast, Josh Grelle does an outstanding job taking a character that could have been comparable to Shinji Ikari in the wrong hands and presenting his insecurities in a relatable way, drawing a distinct line between the shades of hope and despair that he goes through in the story. Jerry Jewel, in turn, plays off this sense of vulnerability in an appropriately lovable and goofy manner, but is still able to convey drama when Victor has to be serious, and inspiration when he has to be supportive, all while sporting a fun but somewhat cartoony Russian accent, and thankfully, the two of them are able to portray a very believable level of sexual and romantic chemistry, giving their character’s admittedly ambiguous romance some much needed gravity.

Of course, while Victor’s accent may not sound the most believable, Micah Solusod makes up for it in spades with his portrayal of the ambitious Yuri Plisetsky, who he plays with an accent that’s unbelievably perfect. He apparently studied the language vigorously, and even hired a dialect coach, and the result sounds so authentically thick that you’d be surprised to learn he isn’t a native speaker drawing from personal experience, like Todd Haberkorn was in Baccano. The rest of the cast is filled out by Funimation regulars, all of whom put on strong performances. While Sonny Strait and Vic Mignona didn’t have to do very much in their roles as skating commentators, they’re still a joy to hear either way. Despite being famous for his deep voice and low, gravely register, Chris Sabat dazzles in the opportunity to go against type as a highly effeminate Swiss skater, and Jeremy Inman pulls off a nicely subtle Canadian accent as the cocky JJ. Colleen Clinkenbeard, J Michael Tatum and many more show up in small but still enjoyable roles in a dub that I’d definitely recommend checking out.

Yuri On Ice is an anime that comes with some pretty high praise behind it. No matter where you look, it was easily the most popular title to come out in 2016, and it garnered rave reviews from both critics and general audiences alike. You’d normally expect a title that’s been held up on that high of a pedestal to have suffered some backlash as a result, but the negative reactions have been fairly subdued. It’s probably the most mainstream LGBT-themed anime that’s come out since Revolutionary Girl Utena, and while it’s certainly a lot more accessible than Kunihiko Ukihara’s seminal classic, it’s somehow inspired just as much debate over whether or not over whether the alleged queer elements are even really there, or if they’re just the product of a bunch of delusional shippers and frustrated LGBT otaku just seeing what they want to see in it. Actually, considering the fact that there’s an upcoming movie for the series that’s carrying the ominous subtitle of ‘Adolescence,’ that comparison might not be as wild as it sounds. What kind of car do you guys think Victor will turn into, anyway?

As for me, I’ve seen the show twice, and I have to admit, it does have a lot of things going for it. In addition to the amazing visual and audio quality, and the stellar English dub, the story is built around three incredibly strong main characters. Between the two Yuris, I can find different parts of my life where I find both of them intensely relatable. With the main Yuuri, I can easily identify with his lack of confidence and personal anxiety, wanting to run away from things I feel I’ll never be good enough for, getting crushed over my losses and wondering why I should even bother wasting my time at things that I just don’t think are going to work out. With Yurio, I can relate to the exact opposite... When I actually am good at something, I just want to dominate at it, prove my superiority, and be recognized as the best while people I feel are less deserving should move out of my way and fall by the wayside. And yet, ironically, my favorite character is actually the one I don’t relate to at all, that being Victor, just because he’s the kind of supportive, kind-hearted person you just want to be friends with.

This all ties in to the main thing Yuri On Ice gets praised for, it’s LGBT elements and over-all homosexual overtones. There are a lot of people who consider Yuri and Victor to be one of the best, if not the best, queer relationship in anime, and the backlash to this has mainly been confusion over whether or not they were ever in a relationship in the first place. The first time I watched it, I was in this camp, and I was disappointed that the series never ‘went there,’ AKA the two were never canonically confirmed to be a couple. On a second watch, however, I feel like I can confidently say that, oh yeah, they went there. They just didn’t tell you that they went there, which in some ways makes the representation even stronger. If you know where the show’s going ahead of time, it’s a lot easier to read between the lines and pick up on all the subtext without needing some grand romantic moment to confirm what you’re seeing, and I honestly feel kind of dumb for not picking up on it all the first time... But this had some consequences that you may be a little torn about.

If you're going to have a subtle romantic plot that never makes itself obvious, then the other elements of the story have to be strong enough to support it, and depending on your perspective, that might be where the series falls flat. For starters, the cast is bloated with seemingly random side characters, and while they were all given at least enough attention to have unique identities and backstories, they wind up being forgotten about so quickly that they honestly just wind up feeling interchangeable. Sure, there are a few moments when the thoughts going through a character’s mind might carry some parallels to Yuuri and Victor, but their actual connections to the main cast or the main plot are tenuous at best and non-existant at worst. Is that a bad thing, though? You’re not really given any reason to care about them or their problems, but I don’t really think you’re supposed to. I feel like the series was going for something more along the lines of a real life feel, which is a bold line for a fictional story to walk.

In most stories, I want everything I’m seeing to be somehow important. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be deep and interconnected. In Toradora, one of my favorite moments was the reveal that one of the side characters had actually managed to get a girlfriend, because it was a reminder that the characters had lives outside of Ryuji and Taiga’s drama. Well, in Yuri on Ice, everybody in the competition has their own life, everyone has their own problems, and the glimpses we get into their lives remind us that, like Yuuri, winning the gold isn’t the most important thing in the world, but a goal that they’ve placed some symbolic meaning onto. It actually kind of reminds me of Bojack Horseman, who got everything he ever wanted, but still wasn’t happy or fulfilled at the end of it. Success doesn’t denote happiness. This series is painfully aware of the age old trope called ‘the McGuffin,’ and it’s story very deliberately deconstructs it’s alleged importance in a character’s story arc.

It’s because of this that there are no real stakes in the competition. I won’t give away how things end at the Grand Prix finale, but Yuuri could have scored literally anywhere in the rankings and it wouldn’t have affected the conclusion of his arc. The same thing goes for all of his costars, even JJ, who defines his entire brand on success and perfection. I don’t think it’s an accident that the only character who never really feels fulfilled or complete is Yurio, the character who puts the most importance on getting that gold in the first place. He has the greatest thirst for gold, but one has to wonder, what happens if he gets it? What comes after that? More competition? More gold? He needs a true reason to compete, and he’s the only person there who doesn’t have one... For now. He’s young, and you have to figure that he’ll eventually move past his petty rivalry and find something more meaningful in life, but once again going back to Bojack Horseman, the opposite could also be true. So no, I don’t think the story is too weak to support a subtle romance. I think it works just fine.

While I get that the lack of confirmation in Yuuri and victor’s relationship can be a sticking point for some, I would also like to point out that this is a series about finding something more meaningful in life than just the goals we set before us, and as such, it would follow that their relationship offers something more meaningful than confirmation. In terms of queer representation, there’s been a long trend of homosexual characters being plagued by two very negative tropes; The tragic ending, and the struggle against homophobia. To put it bluntly, a disproportionate amount of gay characters die, and a lot of straight audiences generally don’t accept queer characters as anything other than porn unless their plight is framed sympathetically... Things like bullying, disowning, societal stigma, etc. What Yuri on Ice presents is something we don’t see nearly enough... A positive, healthy same-sex relationship that’s been normalized to the point that it suffers issues beyond the obvious, which is both important and life-affirming, taking the high road and presenting a queer romance in such a way that completely normalizes it.

Yuri On Ice is available from Funimation. There’s an OVA included with the English release that’s just three minutes of Yurio doing a new performance, but despite the lack of content, it may very well be one of the best things in the history of things. There’s also a movie scheduled to come out next year, which I already mentioned, and I’ll be damn disappointed if it’s either A) a condensed retelling of the series because I hate those things to death or B) anything but a completely incoherent mindfuck like the last LGBT anime movie with Adolescence in the title.

It’s true that Yuri!! On Ice won’t work for all viewers, and trust me, I’m not just talking about the homophobic ones. I personally had to see it a few times to understand it, and I actually had to rewrite this particular review after hearing some of the thoughts that a friend of mine had on it. I did have a few issues with it, like how you had to watch the same skating performances over and over again with only slight variations in them, but it was a problem I was able to get over fairly easily. Even my issue with the side characters isn’t really a big deal, as the series may not give you a reason to care about them, but whether or not you do is entirely inconsequential. There’s more than enough to them to justify investment, and yeah, they all have their very loving and devoted fan followings, but even if you don’t give a shit about them, it doesn’t hurt the story or diminish them as people.

In every Japanese high school, there are clubs, ran by diligent students who wish to share their passions with others. While there are of course some unique clubs out there, just about every school has at least one club dedicated to the paranormal, be they ghost hunters, researchers, or plain old horror buffs. But there’s one school, cobbled together from both new and old buildings alike, where their Paranormal Research Club is quite unique compared to the others. Not only is it situated in the farthest reaches of the oldest section of the building, but it’s leader is nowhere to be found. ... Try as you might ,you’ll probably never see her... That is, unless you catch her moving items out of the corner of your eye, or if you should happen to stumble on her remains. You see, this club’s mysterious Ghost President is, in fact, a ghost, and her club was formed on the idea of figuring out the truth about her past... Her young life, as well as her untimely death. Should you join this club, don’t be scared. She’s nice. At least, she’ll try not to hurt you.

Here’s a funny story for you... I went into this series blind, knowing no information outside of what I could remember about it from a previous viewing back before it had a dub, and for the longest time, I was convinced that it was a Shaft title, most likely directed by Akiyuki Shino, as it had his style all over it. There are quite a few anime out there that have an eclectic feel to their visuals, with a bizarre sort of cinematography that makes each shot transition feel random and disjointed enough to leave a jarring feeling behind, and while not all of them are by Shinbou, I generally feel the creepier ones tend to come from him, and this series had it’s creep flag raised high and proud, but where most of Shinbo’s work feels creepy in a skeevy, perverted sort of way... Even when it’s presented with some degree of subtlety, like it was in Madoka Magika... This one was creepy in a way that felt more appropriate to the horror genre. I thought, hey, I guess this means it’s one of his better projects, where he used his weird penchants to achieve a greater effect, right?

Well, no, but I wasn’t too far off. This anime was actually produced by Silver Links, and it was directed by it’s most prolific and prominent employee, Shin Onuma. Want to guess where Onuma worked before he jumped ship to the newly founded Silver Link? That’s right, he previously worked at Shaft, and worked very closely with Shinbou. There’s so much overlap between them before 2009 that I actually found conflicting information, each of which gave one or the other credit for directing the second Negima series. I looked through Onuma’s filmography, and I was pretty impressed by what I saw there... Out of the titles that I’d seen, a lot of them were in fact titles that used a Shinbou sort of visual style, but with a smarter and more thoughtful approach. That’s not to say he shies away from the male gaze, or never accentuates the assets of his female characters, but he at least feels like he has the ability to turn such proclivities off whenever they’re not called for, which is a quality I don’t think Shinbou had very often.

Since Dusk Maiden is a horror title, at least partially, Onuma does crank up the weirdness of his visual style to establish mood and create an unsettling atmosphere, or even to symbolically express the relationships between characters, and while it can get annoying once or twice, that’s more a reflection on the content itself rather than the way it’s being presented(more on this later). It doesn’t always work, but it at least consistently feels creative and ambitious, which I sadly can’t say for the character designs. The characters are drawn extremely to type, surpassing generic and moving all the way into cliche territory, even if it works in some cases, like in the design of the title character Yuuko, who looks like the archetypal Japanese beauty, with pale skin and long black hair, and a school uniform that Blood C had just made fun of a few years prior. It works in her case, as you’d expect a ghost to feel old-fashioned, but her love interest looks like every bland harem lead ever, the tsundere looks like your typical short hair, breast-envy tsundere, and don’t get me started on the genki girl.

I’ve done quite a few reviews where my access to a soundtrack has been limited or outright non-existent *Cough*Yurionice*cough* but with Dusk Maiden, I don’t have the problem at all, because the official DVD set comes with two soundtrack CDs in the case. There are now 45 tracks haunting my Itunes, but unfortunately, there isn’t much I can say about the soundtrack as a whole, because it’s kind of all over the place. That’s not to say any of it’s bad, but it’s about as varied and unrestrained as the show’s visual style, so there really aren’t any common features to discuss. It’s a bunch of different kinds of tunes, and they all sound good. Composers Kiego Hoashi and Ryuichi Takada clearly had a large order to fill, and I have to imagine that they exhausted themselves doing it. I guess three of the biggest trends across the collection would be that most of them either go for a traditional Japanese sound, a tense feeling of dread and urgency, or the kind of perky and upbeat melodies that you’d usually hear during casual scenes in any slice of life anime, but of a higher quality and less repetitive nature than your typical dating game background track.

There are a few stand-outs, such as the theme for the mysterious villain Shadow Yuuko, which is both terrifying and full of very subtle foreshadowing. Despair is an aptly titled tune that sounds like a violin playing heavily along to a somber music box, and it’s also one of the few tunes I actually remembered from it’s use in the series before checking out the soundtrack CDs. This is also the case for Altar, one of the songs I noted as objectively terrifying during my viewing, as it can only be described as the theme to an upcoming blood ritual, with it’s mixture of ominous ceremonial noises and childish accompanying choir. I didn’t really care much for the opening, at least on a visual scale, as it looks just as eclectic and offbeat as the show itself, but without nearly as much inspiration or direction, so it just feels like a bunch of random clips set to music. I do think the song, Choir Jail by Konomi Suzuki, is very nice, as it’s intense and emotional, and is able to lyrically capture some of the darker elements of Yuuko’s situation. I actually liked the ending theme better, as it was a much prettier song, with beautiful visuals that are actually allowed to linger, and you get to see Yuuko herself singing it, which is a nice tough.

The cast of characters was really small, being that they didn’t even introduce a fifth speaking role until episode 5, so Sentai Filmworks didn’t have a very tough job to do when it came time to cast the dub. I’m pretty sure they knew what they were doing, though, because they put four of their best talents in the main roles, with a small group of other well known names floating in from time to time as either small guest roles or nameless extras. They gave the title role to Emily Neves, one of the most in-demand voice actors in the industry, and in my opinion, the best new actor to debut in the 2010’s. She has a very wide range, as well as a chameleonic quality that easily puts her in a prime spot for numerous different roles, and it’d be an understatement to say that Yuuko was a complex enough character to give Neves a lot to work with. She’s able to put her talents on full display with this character, to the point that she could honestly just submit this series as her demo reel if she ever needed one.

Clint Bickham hasn’t done a whole lot of acting in his career, with his only consistently active years being in 2013 and 2014, but he’s shown in other titles that he can play boring or generic harem leads while still sounding genuine and expressing believable emotion, which he does a fine job of here. Brittney Karbowski was of course the perfect choice to play Momoe, the energetic, carefree and somewhat dimwitted comedy relief character, as she was basically able to cut loose and overact like a psycho in all of her melodramatic, loud, upbeat genki girl glory. As for Jessica Boone in the role of Kirie... Well... I have nothing but respect for her, but my enjoyment of her performance in this series bears a direct correlation to my fondness for her character, and to put it nicely, I wasn’t fond of her very often. She does play another character briefly, but I can’t really say who for spoilery reasons, but I like her better there. It’s a great dub that I’d highly recommend, even if it’s just for Emily Neves fans.

Sigh... Here we go again. It’s another damned school club anime. Ever since it was established that this particular sub-genre of Slice of Life was marketable, and that they could make a successful and popular one through little to no creativity or effort, they’ve been popping up everywhere, as excuses for story-tellers to cram a color-coded collection of waifus, or just a small harem, into one room so they could spend a season or two putting them through random stories. Dusk Maiden isn’t the first anime of it’s ilk to base it’s school club around an edgy sort of theme, hell, I don’t even think it’s the first one to use a paranormal theme, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t take the formula and do something bold and new with it. I don’t believe there’s any sort of idea or subject matter that’s doomed to failure from the start, and a good team can spin gold out of any sort of material you can imagine, so what exactly does this series bring to the table?

Well, actually, it has quite a few things going for it. I don’t think i’ve ever said this about any other anime before, but I absolutely love the setting here. Dusk Maiden takes place in a Japanese High School that’s cobbled together in a make-shift fashion with old, historic buildings, as well as new construction, to make something of a Frankenstein school. I’m the type of guy who likes to explore whenever he enters new buildings, I always get into the video game frame of mind and start looking for loot or whatever the real life equivalent of easter eggs would be, and one of my favorite things for a school life anime to do is to set a few episodes in the old, abandoned school house. Well, in Dusk Maiden, the old, abandoned schoolhouse is part of the school itself, and it sets an atmosphere that wouldn’t be out of place in the Winchester mansion, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. The school is maze-like, it’s full of secrets, and the way it’s shot is so dark and creepy that I get excited at the possibility of what might happen in there.

But that’s not even it’s best feature. Yuuka, herself, is by far one of the best characters I’ve ever seen in an anime, at least from a writing standpoint. There’s a lot I can’t say about her, for fear of giving away some pretty heavy spoilers, and the whole show is basically a character study on her(even though I don’t think it was trying to be), that almost every element of the story and plot are in some way connected to her. For the sake of comparison, she’s fleshed out and interconnected even more thoroughly than Haruhi Suzumiya was, and that’s quite a feat. She’s introduced to us as a bored, happy go lucky ghost girl, living her life lack-a-daisically in her clubroom, which was formed for the sake of recovering all of her lost memories, and there are far more layers in that sentence alone than you could possibly guess. There’s only one thing about her I wasn’t really fond of, and that unfortunately leads me to the show’s greatest failing. While there’s a lot to like about Dusk Maiden, it is ultimately a slave to it’s genre.

To be fair, the first four episodes get off to a great start. The pilot is written in an extremely clever way, setting up pretty much everything it has to, and introducing every single character at their best. The following three episodes are backstory as to how Yuuka and Teiichi met, as well as how Momoe and Kirie entered into the picture, and the dynamics between them. These episodes didn’t feature anyone outside of the main four, so it was able to spend a lot of time on them, building up their relationship as a club and as friends, and dropping a ton of really smart clues about Yuuko’s past and the identity of the mysterious enemy stalking them from the shadows. Of course, the good times can’t last forever, because this is a harem anime, and it just had to move into love triangle territory eventually. Granted, the culture fest story ar does introduce a pretty relatable villain, but she doesn’t stick around, leaving our little harem to it’s own devices.

Being that this is a harem, we get all of the worst harem cliches. The main male character is a boring, unremarkable wet sock, but all three of his co-stars are in love with him, and somehow, the one with no explanation gets off the easiest. Yuuko’s love for him basically boils down to the fact that he’s the first person in the school to see and openly acknowledge her, which is kind of a low bar when you think about it, although it does make sense when you take the decades she’s spent alone into account. There’s another reason that’s eventually revealed, but it’s kind of pointless, outside of the fact that it IS a reveal. Momoe is in love with him because, as she puts it, he’s really capable and knows how to take action, which kind of floats between vague bullshit and a complete misunderstanding, as she probably got that impression from all of the ghostly mysteries that Yuuko allowed him to solve.

Kirie doesn’t even have an explanation, as she just starts getting jealous of his relationship with Yuuko in episode 5, and from there, she spends the rest of the series either acting like a love-struck tsundere or dumping exposition and explaining things that most viewers would have been able to figure out on their own. This is in spite of the fact that she was a much more interesting character up until that point, and her relationship to her ancestor Yuuko had far more promise to it. Momoe at least stays consistent throughout this process, as she never stops being the comic relief dumbass of the group, but her love for Teiichi is so uninspired that at one point she actually proclaims, out loud, her joy over being useful to him. As you might expect, all of this is peppered with the usual harem fare, like barbie-doll nudity, a swimsuit episode, and girls cooking for Teiichi with a heavy emphasis on the importance of feeding him with their chopsticks(Say ahh! Christ, I’ll never understand the romantic appeal of feeding someone like they’re a fucking baby), but there is kind of a silver lining at the end of it all.

Once the will-they-won’t-they hurdles are cleared, the actual romance between Yuuko and Teiichi is a really lovely one, and it’s not hard to get invested in it. Granted, there’s very little substance to the romance, and some of the more obvious issues with a human loving a ghost are largely avoided, and a poignant, beautiful ending is immediately ret-conned by the post credits sequence, and the two rejected romance options never let go of their obsession after he’s officially off the table, but it’s still very effective for what it is. The harem elements absolutely cripple Dusk Maiden’s potential, and the romance may be weaker than it seems on the surface, but thankfully, these elements are never placed front and center, and Yuuko’s story is still strong enough to make the series worth watching. If you squint hard enough, you could even see some messages hidden in the text, like that most people only see what they want to believe, you can’t be a complete person if you cast aside negative emotions, and labyrinthian school buildings are fucking awesome.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original manga is not available stateside, but the DVD does come with two OVA episodes... One that’s pure comedy and pg-13 nudity, and one that’s an extended version of the final episode, but I have no idea what’s supposed to be extended about it. The CD soundtrack, as I mentioned, is also included.

I know a lot of this review came out more negatively than I wanted it to, but that’s because all of this anime’s best qualities are either subjective on my part or mired in deep spoilers, which made it’s worst qualities so much easier to talk about. I did, however, have a mostly positive experience with it, as behind all of the groan-worthy harem nonsense, there’s an engaging story surrounding a really complex and interesting character. The comedy is also largely effective, although it never quite reaches the precedent set by the pilot episode. There are parts of it that remind me of Robert Westall’s The Promise and the animated movie Paranorman, which can never be a bad thing, and it’s strongly constructed mystery is far more memorable than it’s cringe-worthy harem elements. I wish the ending had stuck to it;s guns rather than resorting to a cheap cop-out, especially since it never got a sequel to justify it, but I still really enjoyed the story up until that point, for the most part. I give Dusk Maiden of Amnesia a 7/10.

Yui Hirasawa is just an ordinary, albeit lazy, teenage girl with no real ambition or direction in life. While she initially has no interest in doing any extracurricular activities in her new high school, her fear of becoming a neet inspires her to check out the Light Music club, which she’d heard about in passing, and which she thinks would be an easy, low-maintenance club where she’d be able to hang out and play light music, like the castanets or something. She couldn’t be more wrong, though, as the band turns out to be led by Ritsu Tainaka and Mio Akiyama, two girls with actual ... ambition of forming a band and performing, and the gentle Tsumugi Kotobuki, who was drawn in previously by the prospective band’s friendly atmosphere. Now on the spot, Yui discovers that if she wants to have a chance of joining this club, and hanging out with her new friends on a regular basis, she’ll have to buy and learn the guitar! Thankfully, she does wind up being something of a savant with the instrument, but will that be enough to make her a worthy band member, or will all of their efforts lead to a flop?

So, if you’ve watched a lot of anime from Kyoto Animation, you may have noticed that in the late 2000s, the animation quality of their work was a bit inconsistent. I touched on this in my Clannad Afterstory review, but K-On! seems to get the brunt of the attention from this issue, even though I’d still argue that Afterstory had it way worse. For most of Kyo-Ani’s existence, they were known to produce only the highest quality animation, full of consistent character models, fluid, gorgeous animation and highly expensive art techniques, but there was a gap around this particular time period, and K-On! is firmly a product of that time. I’d like to call it K-On!’s ugly phase, but the truth is, it’s inconsistent nature meant that it also looked fine, or even downright good, at least some of the time. To be sure, there are moments in K-On! that proudly carry the flag of what Kyo-Ani’s capable of, but they’re unfortunately few and far between, and their usage isn’t even consistent, as similar scenes will be animated differently.

to give you an example of what I’m talking about, there are two scenes where the cast sings on stage at their school... Once at their first culture fest, and again at their second one a year later(yes, time passes awkwardly fast at first). For the first one, the animators pulled out all the stops, providing fluid animation that was almost on par with the Live Alive scene from Haruhi, and pairing it up with a beautiful fantasy music video of the girls getting in trouble with the law while cruising the desert in a convertible. It’s a very inspired and well executed scene, and it had a fucking tank in it. At the second scene, a year later, the visuals are heavily downplayed, and shows a lean towards what many have dubbed the ‘runny eggs’ style of animation, a technique that somehow showcases frantic movement on the cheap using broken and ugly character models, and if I’m being honest, even the singing itself looks terrible in this scene, with the animators doing god knows what with Yui and Mio’s over-animated but under-budget lips.

Actually, now that I think of it, that whole episode looks pretty bad. Culture festival episodes are normally one of the occasions when a production team should work their hardest, since they’re expected to animate an environment where there are a lot of people walking around and a lot of events going on, and they nailed it with the first year, but this one feels stiff and static all the way through, with lifeless frozen crowds and stills of the freeze-framed audience intersperced throughout the concert, like they were trying desperately to save money. This says to me one of two things: Either they blew their budget early and had to work on fumes from there on, which suggests poor budget management, or the whole show was just plagued with poor budget management in general. Seeing how the very first scene of the very first episode was in fact done in the runny eggs style, I’m tempted to believe the latter. Rather than hiding their shoestring budget smartly, they tried to make the series look lavish on as little funds as possible, and it often feels like the most try-hardy thing ever as a result.

As for the artwork itself, it’s a lot better. The backgrounds are very well detailed, right down to the seemingly pointless and random elements of wear and tear on building interiors, scuff marks on school floors, and merchandise in stores and shops. There are a few scenes that take place in a music shop, and while I don’t personally know enough about guitars to verify if all the models shown on the pegs are taken from real life, they’re convincing enough that I wouldn’t argue if someone said they were. The character designs are also really well done, but it’s kind of to a fault, because I can’t look at them without seeing the work that went primarily into their marketability, as they were very clearly designed to look attractive to a certain sort of viewer, who’d be likely to divide into waifu-worship camps and buy figures and body-pillows of their chosen best girl. It’s true that this sort of thing happens with a lot of anime, but K-On! is one of a very special few where it feels like their proportions, moe elements and appearance varieties were specifically geared towards gaining such a reaction. Color coding wasn’t really a thing yet, I don’t think, but the intention is still right there just the same.

Now, you would think a series that’s about music would have great music, am I right? Well, yeah, in some respects. Being that it’s a series about a band, it’s obvious that there’d be insert sings, aka the songs that are actually written and performed by the band, which is probably the biggest advantage this type of story has over it’s manga counterparts. Yeah, it’s possible for a book series to have fully realized canonical music, but since Mercedes Lackey doesn’t make anime, we’ll have to settle for adaptations. The in-universe music is one of the biggest highlights of K-On!, as it not only feels perfectly in-character and believable given the sensibilities of the character writing the songs and the experience level of the band, but it’s also fun to listen to on it’s own, just as ordinary singles. Granted, it’s no Beck, but it can still sound pretty awesome. The song titles are genuinely funny, with titles as ridiculous as (I’m not making this up) ‘My Love is a Stapler,’ which might just overtake Chobits’ ‘I Beg your Pudding’ as the weirdest song title in anime.

If the songs the characters perform are too amateurish for you, there’s always the closing theme, Don’t Say Lazy, which acts as a sort of alternate universe representation of the kind of music video the club might make if they ever went pro(and I say alternate universe because that’s not really the direction the series was ever gonna go), and it is legitimately awesome. On a somewhat sour note however is the opening, because I’m being honest, the endings were always better than the openings for this series. The song “Cagayake! GIRLS” is okay, but the singing is a bit too nasally for my taste, and the visuals are way too frenetic and hastily edited, which makes the whole video feel like one giant headache to me. The actual soundtrack is a bit more tolerable, but it’s still very generic and loopy, and if you remember any of it, it’ll probably be for the wrong reasons, as the tracks sometimes play way too loudly, becoming annoying during a lot of the show’s less eventful moments.

The insert songs are still awesome, and while they didn’t get dubbed for the show’s English release, the dub is still really solid. for the main cast, Bang! Zoom grabbed the legendary Stephanie Sheh for the lead role, where she was able to add a mischievous and cheerful edge to her light-voice, soft-spoken type-casting, playing a character that was firmly within her comfort zone but still different enough to stand out. I should hardly have to state that she loses herself in the role, because this is Sheh we’re talking bout, and this is what she does. They then surrounded her with newcomers to the business and a few under-appreciated journeymen actors, with other voice acting veterans like Karen Strassman, Laura Bailey and Xanthe Huynh appearing in side and supporting roles as the class adviser, a helpful student council member, and Yui’s little sister, who does sound convincingly like she might be related to her. There’s a definite resemblance in her voice. Strassmen also deserves high praise for playing such a nuanced and mood-swing afflicted teacher.

For the journeyman, Cristina Vee and Cassandra Lee Morris, who play the dynamic duo of Mio and Ritsu respectively, have been working their asses off since 2005, and they’re two of the most reliable character actors in the business. They’ve worked on a lot of projects together in the past, which no doubt helped them pull off the chemistry needed to portray two best friends who’ve been stuck with each other since childhood. I often see Vee brought up, more recently than in the past, as a voice actor to keep your eyes out for, but there aren’t enough people talking about Morris, who seems to have the ability to deeply understand the inner workings of whatever character she’s given, and can play them with such natural ease that she kind of gets overlooked. The perfect example of this is her performance as Kyuubey in Madoka Magika. Of course, Vee also knocked it out of the park in that show, which actually has a few other connections to K-On! now that I think about it.

Moving onto the newcomers, we have Christine Marie Cabanos and Shelby Lindley, both of whom were also in Madoka Magika, which is a sure sign that around the turn of the decade, Bang Zoom was really trying to push these four girls as the next big thing. Lindley and Cabanos both got their start in the 2010’s, but while Lindley played a very lovable Tsumugi, she didn’t do much else in the field. She had a few other roles, but her main source of employment seems to have been Hyperdimension Neptunia, which she played the character Ram in both the series and the games. Cabanos has stuck around, which is a good thing, because it sort of took her a while to find her feet. I honestly don’t like her as Azusa, because just like her role as Madoka, she feels kind of awkward and out of place, like she’s trying to sound smaller and quieter than she really is. If you’ve read my reviews of Kill La Kill and Toradora, you’ll know that I’m much, much more fond of her nowadays, as she’s really proven herself to be a star. Anyway, the dub is great, it’s fairly accurate to the sub, give it a listen.

Now, if I may confess something, I’m not the hugest fan of the slice of life genre. That’s not to say I hate it or anything... I don’t really hate any genre, really. There are quite a few slice of life anime I like, quite a few that I hate, a ton that I’m more or less ambivalent to, and a very small number of them that I love. There’s nothing specific that they have to do to please me, but I do ask that whatever they’re doing, they do it well, and put forth a genuine effort. I love Azumanga Daioh because it had a unique identity, it knew exactly what it was and what it wanted to be, and almost everything it did was effective. I love Beck because it’s slice of life elements were overshadowed by it’s coming of age elements, and I love shows like Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid and The Devil is a Part timer because they had really bizarre premises that they explored to the fullest. None of these shows were really plot-heavy, but they all had something about them that I could enjoy either all of or most of the time.

However, slice of life has earned a bad reputation for itself over the last decade or so, and I’m sad to say that K-On! is kind of a milestone in that evolution. I don’t know how accurate this observation is, but from what I’ve seen, Haruhi Suzumiya popularized the use of school clubs in an anime, and Lucky Star established how successful a show about high school girls doing nothing could be as long as it was aimed at the right audience. K-On!, which was suspiciously produced by the same company as those two titles, was the show that combined those two ideas, and it became such a monster hit that streaming sites have been littered with shows about high school kids... Normally either all-girl, or with just enough boys to establish a harem... Forming a club and then fucking around with no purpose other than to create shipping fantasies, fuel the fetishy fantasies of a bunch of basement dwellers, and sell tons of licensed merchandise. This may not have started with K-On!, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that it wasn’t a major inspiration for this particular trend.

Leaving it’s cultural impact aside, how is K-On! on it’s own merits? Well, if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you may remember my main complaint about Lucky Star being that some characters had stronger comedic chemistry than other characters, and they became more and more boring the farthest you got from the main cast, with several side characters seemingly only existing for the sake of supporting the bigger draws. K-On! doesn’t have this problem. In fact, I’d say it’s strongest element is the synergy of it’s cast. Rather than there being only two characters with a spark between them, and a bunch of extra characters added in at the eleventh hour, K-On! keeps it’s cast small, and they all have strong chemistry with each other. You could take any two characters, put them in any situation, and there’s a chance... Granted, not a guarantee... That something entertaining will happen between them, as they all have strengths and weaknesses that either clash or click with each other.

Part of this is the fact that these characters are all very well written and developed. That’s not to say any of them are unique or anything, because trust me, you’ve seen these characters both before and since, but there’s just enough nuance to their identities that none of them ever feel like one-note jokes. They’re all flawed, but they contribute both to the band and to their friendship, forming some surprisingly complex connections with each other. They make sense together, and on a lot of different levels. This can unfortunately lead to some less than healthy relationships, a few of which are distinctly codependent... Mio’s dynamic with Ritsu, or the far more worrisome one that Yui shares with her younger sister... But they feel natural rather than contrived. Yui is shameless and has a natural charisma, but is also spoiled and lazy. Mio is mature and responsible, but also shy and delicate. Ritsu is passionate and energetic, but also greedy and careless. Tsumugi is generous and agreeable, but also socially awkward and a bit sheltered. They bring out the best and worst in each other, which makes for great comedy.

Sadly, as funny as the show can be, it’s miserable at drama, and oh boy does it try it’s hand at drama. That’s not to say it never works... At one point, Mio and Ritsu have a fight that feels pretty raw and poignant, for what it is... But if you’re going to have an inspirational drama where your characters have to overcome the odds in order to create some feel good moments, then you have to have stakes, and there are absolutely none here. Yeah, you kinda want to see the band get better and achieve their dreams of performing at the Budokan, but it’s also pretty solidly established that they’re largely fine with goofing off and sitting around a table eating sweets together. The absolute worst case scenario would be if the club got disbanded due to someone’s failing grades, but if that happened, they could easily just hang out and do the same exact thing at someone’s house. Even if you want to see them succeed, there’s absolutely nothing lost if they don’t, which would be fine if they didn’t try so damn hard to make you care.

The most frustrating thing about this is that they had the perfect solution to this problem, in the form of the fifth band member, Azusa Nakano. an underclassmen who joins in the band’s second year, who is a serious guitarist, and who is actually way better at said instrument than her senpai Yui. You’d kind of think her experience would add some perspective to the group, and she’d inspire them to get off their asses and practice more, and that does kind of happen, but it doesn’t have much of a lasting impact, as she quickly gets drawn into their lackadaisical nature, and I know I’ve been praising the show for the nuance of it’s characters, but this is one instance where there shouldn’t have been as much of a compromise. I’d like to say that her presence is felt more in the second season, but it’s really not, as that season has even less plot and story than this season does, and yeah, it didn’t really have a lot of plot or story to lose in the first place. I know I prefer shows that put forth effort, but the higher you aim, the more you have to commit to it, and K-On! really doesn’t have what it takes to shoot for the moon.

K-On! is available from Sentai filmworks. The second season is twice as long, and while it gets boring more often than not, the movie is pretty damn good. It’s not a retelling of the series... I really hate those, for the record... But it’s not really a sequel either, as it follows events that take place during the second season, which were smartly kept off-screen. The manga is available from Yen Press, which is slightly dirtier than the series, but still mostly PG. There are also two sequel manga, one featuring the girls in college, and one featuring Azusa as a senior forming her own Light Music Club, but that second one’s honestly pretty weak. There are a few OVA episodes that are included in the series DVD releases, and there’s a current manga that started this year called K-On! shuffle, which I know nothing about.

Despite it’s flaws, and it has a few, K-On! is still a fun show to watch, and I really don’t think it’s aged that badly. It actually feels more at home in today’s market, which has been flooded with the dredge that it inspired, than it did back in 2009. Part of this is because of it’s strong cast of relatable characters(seriously, I see bits of myself in every single one of them), but it’s also due to the banging in-universe soundtrack and it’s keen sense of comedy. It’s never going to achieve any sort of legendary status, but I don’t think it really has to, as it succeeds at being a fun little diversion, a decent waste of time, and arguably one of the better school club slice of life anime, even if that’s not saying a whole lot. If you’re looking for a fulfilling story, you could do a lot better, but if you’re looking for some light-hearted fun, you could do a lot worse. I give K-On! a 7/10.

Hinamizawa is a village frozen in time, and I’m not just talking about it’s isolationist principals. It’s the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone, and most family names can be traced back for centuries. Despite belonging to a family of outsiders, new resident Keiichi Maebara has had no problem fitting in with the community. In less than a year, he’s already amassed a close circle of friends who are just as snarky, competitive and weird as he is, and his days playing games with them are pure, peaceful bliss... Right up until a chance encounter with a transient photographer ... leads him to a glimpse into some of the town’s darker, more disturbing secrets. As it turns out, Hinamizawa was almost destroyed to make way for a dam a few years ago, and the conflict eventually resulted in a gruesome murder... And to make matters worse, mysterious deaths and disappearances have literally become a yearly thing in this quiet village, and the deeper he digs, the closer it takes him to the very people he’s becomes close to. With every new discovery leading to more questions, will Keiichi even survive long enough to untangle this vast, intertwining spiderweb of a mystery?

Studio Deen has a pretty dodgy reputation, but they’ve been getting better in recent years. Obviously, 2006 is not a recent year. Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair, because they did release titles that were okay looking, and that’s pretty much the camp that Higurashi no Naku Koroni, also known as simply When They Cry, belongs to. It’s not too bad looking over-all, nor is it the worst thing I’ve ever seen from it’s studio, but it has a hard time not tipping it’s hand as to the fact that they didn’t have a great budget to work with when they were animating it. It checks off most of the boxes for responsibly managing this issue, though... There are a lot of static images and key frames, but the backgrounds are well drawn and highly detailed, and they’re edited in such a way that they never get boring, what with sharp cuts, dramatic panning in all the right places, intense close-ups, and heavy support from the soundtrack and dialogue to keep you on the edge of your seat while it milks the scenery.

It doesn’t always work, however, and you’ll still get the odd moment when two people are having a conversation while walking, and their pictures are basically just being bounced up and down in time with each other while their lips move, which is kind of an ugly exception to make, considering all the other areas where the visuals were able to successfully compensate for their shortcomings. I’m also willing to bet, although I haven’t really looked into this, that having the series largely take place in the same village means a lot of the backgrounds and scenery get reused, which might be why they were able to splurge so hard on background art. I know that at the very least, the repetitive nature of some stories has allowed animation to be reused, although I can’t say for sure whether or not it happened in more than one obvious instance. I will say that for a village we never leave, the range of settings that it lends itself to is surprisingly diverse, even if most areas get revisited a ton of times.

One area where it does come up short a lot of the time is with character animation. Now, in regard to the character design, as cartoony and over-designed as the characters may look, it turns out that they’re just as malleable as the setting, with each one of them having quite a few more outfits than their basic, everyday anime attire. Yes, I say everyday meaning that the characters do generally wear the same clothes everyday, but they have other outfits too, and the switch between them does feel natural with the way it’s all used throughout the story. The repetitive outfits do help in some cases, like in one story arc where outfits being exchanged between two characters is very important to the plot. The area where the animation falls short is in some instances where we get the aforementioned dramatic close-ups, and the artwork gets so distorted that even if it works in the moment, they look really weird when paused. The characters also unfortunately stray off-model more than once, with some shots showing their legs looking about an inch thick, and some truly derpy expressions for anyone willing to search for them.

The character designs do manage to shine where it counts, though. This is meant to be a horror title after all, and while their outfits and hair colors may be a bit on the goofy side, they’re still designed to be extremely expressive, and instead of the sweet doe eyed smiles and waterfalls of tears that you may expect from similar moe-inspired characters, their faces can contort in very frightening ways, showing off a range of emotion that can convey paranoia, fear, exhaustion, full-on batshit insanity, and in some cases, the cold dead eyes of hopelessness and resignation. Keep in mind, some of these characters are still little, like, literally little. A couple of the female characters have very generously endowed figures, which you’re probably no stranger to if you’re into anime, but even when they are showing cleavage or baring skin, they’re never sexualized, either by the story or the camera. If anything, some of their most revealing moments take place in scenes where you’re meant to be more worried than titillated, with their exposure linked more strongly to their fear and vulnerability than to your pleasure.

The music in this series, for the most part, is very subtle, and used almost exclusively as support for the story. Aside from the obligatory fun with friends music, of which there are a few generic sounding tracks, the composers knew exactly what they were doing whenever it came time to accentuate the tension of a scene, which they can do with nothing more than a few well-picked notes to drone on while these pivotal scenes build up to their inevitable conclusions. One of my favorite tracks is Michishirube, which they play during a lot of the more sad or depressing moments, making it instantly recognizable not just for the feelings it evokes, but for it’s attachment to some genuinely heart-wrenching moments. There’s also a lot to be said for the sound design, which takes the place of the music in a lot of instances, with such effects as concurrent thuds and especially with the shrill cry of cicadas, or Higurashi in Japanese,which the series was of course named after. Sounds like these are way more memorable than the music, which feels like it was kind of the point.

As subtle and forgettable as the music may be... And I have spoken to some people who didn’t realize the series had music at all, which speaks to how good a job the legendary Kenji Kawai did... The opening to this portion of the series is my favorite of all time, and no, that’s not me using hyperbole. The song captures all of the tension and drama of the series, with almost all of the more chilling sound choices taking place in-between the actual verses, and it’s easily one of the only anime songs that I feel gets better when you listen to the original, uncut version, which opens on a more creepy, demonic sounding gasp of a note that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Fatal Frame game. The actual video is filled with imagery that carries the themes of the series as well as clever foreshadowing as to the fates and pasts of the characters. It’s hard to decipher what they all mean without seeing the entire series, so you can’t really appreciate how brilliant the image of Rika taking off a mask really is until later on.

Having said that, I think most audiences will be able to grasp the significance of all the flowers and kaleidoscope imagery, at least as far as it’s representation of twisted, distorted innocence, and while that’s not the central theme of the story, it does support it’s more important themes quite nicely. The singer is a woman named Eiko Shimanaya, a Japanese singer who’s best known for her work on this series, because she sings the opening and closing song for both seasons... And yes, this means she also sings the English language closing song, Why or Why Not, which is sung from the character Rena’s point of view as blood flows over a black background. This, as well, is really awesome.

The English dub, like the animation, is okay. It start s out on a really weird note, with the actors using voices that were obviously directed with the intention of matching their Japanese counterparts, but this is usually a really bad idea. Considering this was a Geneon effort, it’s also not a surprising choice, as a lot of their dubs towards the end of their existence were plagued by screechy, unnatural sounding performances of women trying their best to sound like moe characters, which there really isn’t any English language equivalent to. The problem is just as bad here, but the actors did the best they could with it, and it does get mostly better over time. The voices almost all sound unnatural and awkward, but the actors do settle into their roles fairly quickly, if you manage to stick around long enough for them to do so. The acting, in spite of this unnatural quality, is largely competent, but the performances are just about as inconsistent as the moods swings of the cast.

Grant George, who has a very long resume in both Japanese and American productions, does an admirable job as the lead role Keiichi, even if the voice he has to use sounds like somebody doing a really bad impression of Bob Dylan. He shares a similar quality to most of the rest of the main cast... He sounds weird and awkward during his down-time, but shines really effectively when he has to push the character to more intense material. The same thing goes for Rebecca Fortstadt as Rika, Jennie Kwan as Satoko, and Mela Lee as Rena... They sound almost unbearable most of the time, and rarely ever sound like actual people, but when they have to freak out, scream, or, you know, act at all, you’d practically forget any complaints you may have had about them before. There are two exceptions to this,. and the more bizarre one is Megan Hollingshead, who you may know as both Officer Jenny and Nurse Joy in the earlier seasons of Pokemon, who plays Mion Sonozaki, among others.

With her, it’s the opposite situation. She sounds great normally, matching her Japanese counterpart beat-for-beat, even improving faster than her peers after the awkward beginning, but it’s during the more intense scenes where she has more trouble, sounding over the top and hammy instead of genuinely insane. The other exception is with the supporting cast, most of whom actually used their real names in the credits(the only main actor to do this was Grant George), and while Kyle Hebert and Karen Strassmen do some pretty solid jobs as the ill-fated Jirou Tomitake and Mio Takano, the actor who most impressed me was John Snyder in the role of Detective Oichi, a character who’s personality seemed to change depending on each story arc. Aside from these names, The English dub may be serviceable enough for hardcore dub fans, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the original Japanese. Back when this series was still new, the terrifying performances of the female seiyuu were legendary, and kind of turned the series into a viral hit. The sub is highly recommended in this case.

Speaking of those performances, Higurashi’s popularity in the states is very similar to another title that came out around the same time, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya(It’s eerie how many discussions lead to her, isn’t it?). Both shows slowly gained an audience through viral exposure... Replace the Hare Hare Yukai with videos of over the top death scenes and scary Japanese laughter... And soon took the nation by storm, becoming one of the most popular and well known titles, before the diminishing returns of it’s franchise caught up with it and it faded back into obscurity. These days, it’s easy to find people who’ve never seen either title, which used to not be the case. The difference is that unlike that famous moe nerd comedy, the original Higurashi series has aged really well, at least in terms of story and content. However, since it’s been largely forgotten, I can’t stress enough that this is a show you really need to go into blindly, so before I go any further, I have to ask that you at least watch up to episode 5.

Did you do it? You promise? Good. Rena hates liars.

No, if you’ve gotten that far into the series, you’ve probably noticed a few peculiar details, some of which you may have questions about. Yes, the story escalates very quickly, but more importantly, if you’re like me on my first viewing, you might be confused as to why and how the series reset itself. That’s something you’re going to have to get used to with Higurashi... Rather than one long continuous story, it’s made up of several smaller arcs, which occupy completely different timelines that focus on their own unique situations and perspectives. Setting aside the how, as I promise there is an in-universe explanation for it, the reason why is because this anime is based on a series of visual novels, and if you know anything about those, you’ll know that VN’s and dating games present a tricky challenge to anyone who wants to adapt them... How do you make a coherent series out of a story that has so many branching and unique paths to explore? There are many answers to this dilemma, most of them bad, but Higurashi luckily had the perfect solution ready and waiting in the source material.

I won’t spoil what the secret behind it is, especially because you won’t officially learn it until the second season, but there is a reason that time is always rewound after a huge disaster, and it has several effects on the story, both positive and negative. On the positive side, the pacing is unusually tight, and while the series does have a tendency to goof off in the early stages of most arcs, none of it ever feels like wasted time... Not even the Time Wasting Arc, which, yes, is a thing. Another benefit is the lack of plot armor, as any character can die at any time during a story, and they’ll be there again in the next arc. You would think this would take away the tension and stakes of any given scenario, but you’re wrong, because some seriously strong writing gives each arc a healthy dose of gravity and stakes, which they go out of their way to make you care about, resurrection be damned. Of course, then you have one of the biggest drawbacks of the series, which is the heavy amount of inconsistency between each arc.

First of all, while we’re supposed to believe this is just the same period of time repeating itself, there really isn’t any clear divergence point. Rather, most stories, save for two that work as mirrors of each other from different perspectives, follows a totally different series of events, which feels less like a proper Butterfly Effect story and more like the writers just doing whatever the hell they want. There are some details that never change, such as Hinamizawa’s history and certain events taking place at the Cotton Drifting Festival, but aside from that, some of the changes can be baffling at best and stupid at worst. Like, you’ve seen episode five, right? Notice how easy Mion gave up the fact that she had a twin sister? In the first story arc, she was tight lipped about a lot of her personal details, but she doesn’t even question how Keiichi met her sister, or what he thought of her. I can only assume this was done to service the reveal at the end of the episode, but it feels like a full-on betrayal of her character.

There are a lot of inconsistencies like that, and while I’m glad that certain details that were meant to be reveals and mysteries in previous arcs become common knowledge in future arcs... It does, at least, keep the story from becoming repetitive... It has another element working in it’s favor. Higurashi likes to play around with the concept of an Unreliable Narrator... You know, that literary trope where you don’t know the truth of a story, because it’s being told from the perspective of someone who’s too biased or unstable to give you an accurate recounting of events? There’s more than enough evidence in this story to suggest that it’s narrators don’t always see things as they are, and there are times when you can’t really guarantee if entire events are really going down as you’re seeing them. you can’t trust what’s real and what’s not, which works as an excuse for Higurashi to do plenty of things that I’d call shenanigans on with any other anime. You don’t know whether characters are really living, dying, or even present when you’re told they are, so of course some personality based inconsistencies are going to happen.

Besides, even with those inconsistencies occasionally working against them, the cast of characters in this series is still absurdly strong. They’re all complex and layered, with their own unique flaws and motivations, and these play very well into their own individual stories. To be fair, they don’t all get their own perspective stories, at least not in this season, but they’re still at least explored thoroughly in other character’s stories, either as antagonists or in supporting roles. The issues these characters go through are unbelievably relatable, as well. Even though most of us have never had first hand experience with the more horrifying elements of the stories... Let’s face it, most people don’t wind up involved in the middle of conspiracies or murder cases... They do have to deal with real world issues, like divorce, child abuse, watching loved ones suffer and get taken advantage of, family drama and forbidden love, and while the way they approach and resolve their issues may be extreme, it never feels melodramatic or cheap, because of how well we know and care about the characters.

If I had to group all of these situations into one theme, which would admittedly be a huge stretch, I’d have to see that this is mostly a show about secrets. It’s about the dark secrets you keep from others, secrets you know are being kept from you, what you should and shouldn’t tell your friends and the possible consequences of digging too deeply into someone else’s affairs. This theme is explored thoughtfully, and from many angles, and to be honest, I can personally relate to it, because I’ve been on some very distinct sides of it. I’ve been left in the dark plenty of times in regard to issues directly effecting me. My whole family keeps secrets from me and other people just for the sake of convenience, using obvious strategic lies that I felt alienated by. I used to have friends who I thought I could trust, but who dug up dirt on me behind my back and spread it all to pretty much my entire workplace. I don’t know if you can find all this relatable, but for me, it hits really close to home.

Of course, there are some problematic elements. On top of other issues, there’s some really outdated gender politics on display, with more than one instance of female characters basically being told to smile more, and there’s one really awkward moment where a grown man expresses a genuine interest in romantically pursuing and eventually marrying a preteen, but considering the fact that this is supposed to be 1980’s Japan, we should probably just be grateful that it isn’t worse. Also, while I’m glad there isn’t any obvious romantic sub-plot among the main cast(aside from some flirtatious banter and a couple of hinted or confirmed crushes), which I understand is accurate to the non-H VN, but there is one story arc that could be described as a yandere-type situation, with a character’s psychotic behavior tied directly to her unrequited love for another character, but I’d also argue that her circumstances are much more forgivable than they would be in most similar titles.

Higurashi , or When They Cry, is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original Geneon DVDs are out of print, but the new format is way superior, because there’s a Bluray option, and the disks are divided so that each one carries a different arc, so it’s easier to watch whatever individual story that you want without having to change disks. Sentai also released the sequel, Higurashi Kai, and one of the OVAs, Higurashi Rei, in the same format. Three other OVAs have not been released stateside(but you should totally check out Outbreak), neither have the awful live action movies. The light novels and a live action TV show haven’t been released either, but the manga has been released stateside by Yen Press, and it contains some crazy details from the games that the anime omitted. I don’t know any specifics about the games, but I’ve heard some of them are available online. There’s also a spiritual successor called Umineko, which I’ve seen, and it’s honestly pretty awful, but it’s still kind of interesting with some of it’s choices, so give it a watch.

Higurashi might just be one of the most effective horror titles in anime history. It’s MO is to keep it’s focus on suspense, building up scenes of simple conversations and interactions with tense music and creepy, unsettling direction, leading to pay-offs so abrupt and shocking that most of them have become memes or AMV Hell jokes in the years since. It avoids using jump scares like the plague, and keeps it’s horror elements centered firmly on the story and plot, and while it doesn’t go out of it’s way to be edgy or disturbing, it still never shies away from showing the gory details of any given scenario when the time is right. The mystery is tightly woven and full of red herrings and unanswered questions, and while it lays out several details at a decent pace, it still leaves enough loose threads to leave you wanting more, even if the second season winds up being a bit of a disappointment. It’s not perfect, though, and even if you were to excuse the lackluster visuals and spotty dub, the writing itself still leaves enough holes to tarnish what could have been considered a masterpiece. I give Higurashi: When They Cry an 8/10.

In times of war, the loss of life can be insurmountable, as the leaders of nations rely on their citizens to become their soldiers to put their lives on the line without putting any thought towards the individual lives that make up their ranks. The history books pay the most attention to the biggest, most significant events, the ones that manage advance the conflict and wipe out the most life, but when you take a closer look, the less significant events can be just as devastating, regardless of the scale. For example, the conflict between America and Japan in world War 2 may ... be largely boiled down to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs that were ultimately fired into the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and while these events may have resulted in millions of innocent lives lost, they weren’t isolated incidents. The United States made many strategic attacks on Japan beginning in October of 1944 and continuing up until the country finally surrendered almost a year later, due in no small part to our efforts to lower morale and cut off vital resources to their suffering population.

It was one of these attacks that killed the mother of Setsuko and Seita, two very young children living in Kobe prefecture, leaving the two of them orphaned and with their future in doubt. The love between them is strong, and the valiant Seita will stoop to the lowest possible level to take care of his younger sister, who’s still a very small child, and who understandably doesn’t have the strength to deal with the cruel burden that’s been placed on their young shoulders... At least not alone. They’ve lost their home, they’ve lost their mother, they have no idea how their father is faring as a member of the Japanese Navy, and the only spark of hope they’ve been able to find lies within the home of their aunt, who takes them in under the assumption that she’s only holding them temporarily until their mother gets out of the hospital, but is dismayed to learn she’s just taken on two new mouths for the long-haul. When the two siblings decide they’re tired of her nagging and strike out on their own, will the bond between them be enough to sustain them, or will they find out that they’ve made a fatal mistake?

For the conclusion of Studio Ghibli month, we’re back to Isao Takahata, whom I previously discussed in my review of Only Yesterday. I said in that review that his visual style is vastly different from Miyazaki’s, and Grave of the Fireflies takes that difference even further. The characters skew more towards realism than I’ve ever seen in an anime before, with almost all of the medium’s most pronounced visual tropes thrown right out the door. It’s long been speculated that the Japanese draw their characters to not look Japanese, and you’d honestly be surprised by the amount of Western influence that went into the medium ever since it began, but Fireflies is designed purely with the Japanese people in mind, which is good, because this movie is telling a story from Japanese history. The character’s eyes are slightly bigger than normal, but they’re a serious downgrade from what you’d normally see in an anime, and that even applies to the toddler character, who’d normally be the exception in any other title.

Normally, even if the adult and teenage characters were drawn to some semblance of a realistic scale, the children would at least be made to look cuter and more moe-like than the adults, but no, Setsuko looks and moves like an actual little kid, with no attempts being made to make her more appealing to the audience, and considering the ways that she gets presented to us towards the end of the film, that’s all for the better. With older characters, at worst, I can say that their features look a bit exaggerated, in regards to their bone structures and skin tone, but they look more like subtle caricatures than actual anime characters. I saw shades of this in the Ogino family from Spirited Away and the present day portions of Only Yesterday, but this movie went entirely in that direction, and while Takahata isn’t really an animator himself, I can definitely see this being the direction he wanted to take it. This design choice was really the only way to present the more grizzly images in the film, which surely helped it to avoid looking as weird and off-putting as Barefoot Gen did while exploring similar subject matter.

The animation is fluid and character movements are graceful, but perhaps a bit restrained, which was probably done so in the pursuit of further realism. That, or they didn’t want any moments of stunning visuals to distract viewers from the story, or to lighten it’s intentionally heavy and tragic tone. I can oddly respect this, as even though it feels like they were holding back a bit, it was done in a ‘less is more; kind of way. That’s not to say that there aren’t big moments where the animation shines... Seita fleeing from his village with Setsuko on his back during an air raid comes to mind... But the animation really isn’t what you remember from scenes like that, it just does it’s part to tell the story. Actually, you’re more likely to remember the slower animation used in moments of mundane life, like the characters eating, or all of Setsuko’s extra little childlike quirks. The actual artwork is gorgeous, even if the sky feels stiff and frozen at times, and the use of lighting and shading is just masterful, with the use of the color red in particular being noteworthy.

The same goes for the music, which mostly hides in the background and stays safely out of the way, ll while supporting the story on an emotional and thematic level, but still deserves a ton of praise once you actually start listening to it. Well, most of it’s hard to notice, but the first one isn’t. Right off the bat, they dipped into what I assume was the public domain at the time(it definitely is now), pulling a 1920’s recording of Amelita Galli-Church, an Italian opera singer, singing There’s no Place Like Home, which is played over the main character keeling over and dying from starvation before getting disposed of by municipal workers as though dead children were as commonplace as dead bugs... Which they sadly were at the time. It’s a sad enough choice on the surface, as even though most viewers probably couldn’t identify the song due to it being sung in Italian(I know I couldn’t), but once you know the song, and once you know the lyrics, it just becomes the most soul crushing thing ever, and possibly even the most soul crushing opening song in movie history. Oh, and it also plays at the end, mirroring the bookend that was Setsuko and Seita’s fate..

But like I said, the rest of the music is a little easy to miss. There are several tunes that sound a bit generic, like they came out of a child’s music box, but they’re used in the film to accentuate moments where the two siblings are bonding and trying to find joy in each others company, cheering each other up and supporting each other in times of hopelessness. For more obviously sad moments, we have tunes like the slow violin piece Two People, which is drawn out in just the right way, with every stroke of the bow, to underscore the scene. Rather than any of the usual Studio Ghibli music composers, Grave of the Fireflies used Michio Mamiya, a man who’s career strangely doesn’t seem to have any other titles in it that most Westerners would recognize, and this was also the last piece of media he ever composed for. I can’t say he’s the best composer I’ve ever heard in an anime, but he did a fantastic job here, and it would be nice to track down some of his other projects, two of which Isao Takahata also directed.

So, I didn’t know this until I started writing this review, but there are two English dubs of this movie. That may not sound surprising, as several of the films in Ghibli’s library have been dubbed twice, but what makes this one stand out is probably the fact that neither dub was done by Disney. The original was a Central Park Media effort, and it was all right, but a little hit and miss. There are a few notable names like Crispin Freeman and Veronica Taylor thrown in, and they do great, and Amy Jones does a phenomenal job as the kids’ burdensome aunt. Seita was played by J Robert Spencer, a stage actor who only ever had this as his one voice role, and he did okay for the most part, but there are a few lines throughout where he sounds a bit too disingenuous with what he’s saying. There are even some exchanges he has with Satsuko that sound kind of condescending, which I know is the point when you’re talking to a little kid sometimes, but it just doesn’t always feel close or loving.

Speaking of Setsuko, they had an older woman named Corinne Orr, who was around sixty at the time, and she sounds like her performance was ripped out of the Higurashi dub. It’s pretty bad. Remember when I told you in my Spirited Away review that Chihiro had a better actor in Japanese, but sounded more believably childlike in English? Yeah, this version of Setsuko had neither of those advantages. I won’t say too much about the new Sentai dub, as I’ve only seen a few clips of it so far, but Emily Neves is one of the most talented voice actors in the field today, and she does a much better job playing the role, and the rest of the cast... Rounded out by Sentai house veterans Shelley Callene-black and Marcy Bannor, both of whom at least sound like they’d be the perfect choices... So if you’re going to watch this movie in English, the Sentai dub is probably the way to go, but I’d still have to recommend the Japanese, and not just because of historical authenticity. Believe it or not, Setsuko and Seita were played by actual children back then, and they did a beautiful job, despite the horrifying events they had to portray.

And speaking of those horrifying events, this film comes with a bit of a reputation, doesn’t it? It’s not uncommon to hear Grave of the Fireflies brought up in discussions regarding not only the most depressing anime of all time, but the most depressing films in general. It’s reputation precedes it so badly that people often hesitate to watch it, weary of the emotional damage it might do to them, and even afterwards, calling it the best movie that they’ll never want to watch again. Now, you know how I feel about tear-jerkers. I’m about as cynical as a critic can get, and I’ve slammed popular ‘sad’ anime titles in the past, calling them manipulative tragedy porn, and arguing against the claims of power placed upon them by fans whom I strongly disagreed with. Having said that, I actually brought up Grave of the Fireflies as an example of what those titles did wrong, and I’m more than happy to defend it after having thrown those other titles under the bus, so what’s so different about this tear-jerker? Why does it get a pass?

Well, to understand why I hold this film in such high regard, you have to first go through it’s many layers. The first layer is on the surface, where it is certainly a sad film, but it’s the way it’s executed that sets it apart. The tragic events aren’t just random occurrences where popular or beloved characters get thrown to the wolves for the sake of eliciting tears. There are reasons for the tragic things that happen, and they’re not sudden twists of fate. They’re rooted in the flaws of the characters in question, and reasons why they’d make the choices they make, and they’re the kinds of choices where you just have to scream “No! Don’t do it!” at the screen, even though you can’t guarantee that in the same situation, you wouldn’t make the same mistakes they do. They also straight up tell you right in the beginning of the movie that Setsuko and Seita will die by the end, which could have ruined everything by making their deaths predictable, but their fate was never meant to be a surprise... Rather, the whole movie is structured in such a way that knowing they die just makes the rest of the film an experience in finding out why, as every little detail building towards it just confirms what you already hoped wasn’t true.

So the story, on it’s own merits, is written really well. The foreshadowing is heavy, but still subtle, and it’s use of fireflies as symbolism for the temporary nature of life is powerful, and at the very least, the characters are compelling in their struggle to survive... They even get their own arcs, some rather short(IE their mother and aunt), but Setsuko’s arc of her declining health and Seita’s arc of his refusal to surrender to the inevitable, both of which are very well written... Honestly, you might be surprised by the second layer, a fact that’s not too unknown, that this story is mostly autobiographical. Almost all of this story, obviously excluding Seita’s death, is based on Akiyuki Nosaka’s personal experiences, and how he blamed himself for the death of his sister during the final years of World War 2. He wrote the novel as an apology to his sister, and most likely as a way to deal with the survivor’s guilt that he suffered from, which is why Seita makes so many bad decisions throughout the story, and his attempts to care for his sister on his own result in her untimely passing, followed by his own, which could almost be seen as a metaphor for the caustic nature of Japan’s unwillingness to surrender to the US, but that’s not what Takahata saw in it.

For the final layer, we’re going to have to dispel another popular hot take, that the film is intended to carry an anti-war message. Now, war is never mentioned as the cause of Seita or Setsuko’s deaths. Sure, there are some parallels between Seita and Japan at the time, and war definitely killed their mother, but the two main characters probably would have pulled through if they’d compromised, sucked it up, and stayed with their aunt, whose only real crime was not stopping them from leaving. On top of this, Isao Takahata had gone out of his way on multiple occasions to reiterate his stance that this film was never meant to be a condemnation of war, and yeah, I know, I’ve argued that the intent of a creator doesn’t negate the interpretation of the viewer... I once discussed this in a very clumsy post about WKUK’s The Grapist, long before I actually knew that The Death of the Author was an actual, existing concept... So you can read the film however you want, and your interpretation is valid, but Takahata actually had his own clear intention for the film.

The final layer is Isao Takahata’s actual intention with the film, which is the reason he felt the life story of a World War 2 survivor needed to be told when it did. If you’re looking through IMDB trivia on this movie, you might find a little summary about his actual intention, which was to convey that Seita and Setsuko were living a failed life due to their isolation from society, and if you were to look a little deeper into his words, you’ll find that this message was specifically tailored to the youth of Japan during the late eighties, who were experiencing a rise in crime and juvenile delinquency like no other in the country’s history. The economy was booming, and the younger generation had no respect or willingness to understand what the older generation had to go through to create that bubble for them, and a lot of them were makinog the same kinds of choices that Seita had... Fuck those uptight geezers, we can make it on our own! And just like with Seita, this attitude didn’t really work out for anyone, as it led to crime, violence, gangs... This is the crime wave that inspired the Akira, if you can believe it.

Takahata’s message to the youth of his generation was that periods like this don’t last forever. You don’t understand where the good times you’re living in came from, you don’t know what people had to live through to establish them, and if you take them for granted instead of working to preserve them, they’ll go away. This is why Seita and Setsuko, as spirits, look out over the horizon of the modern cityscape. This is why the symbolism of fireflies, and all of the decisions that Seita made, were so important. Because Takahata was right, and just a few short years later, the Japanese economy crashed, resulting in a depression that famously saw the nation’s GDP drop by nearly one trillion dollars. This movie is thus firmly a product of it’s times, but on the other hand, the story is told in such a way that it’s somehow still timeless, as the ideas it presents can be applied to any situation where one person, or a group of people, let their pride get the better of them and refuse to accept help.

The saddest thing about this movie, to me, isn’t the death scenes, or the portrayal of war. The saddest thing about it is the fact that most people who watch it say they only ever want to watch it once. I mean, yeah, I get that the material might have been too intense, or that the characters might not have been all that relatable to some of you, but if there’s any movie that deserves to be viewed multiple times, it’s this one. It was important when it was released, and it’s just as important now, as it tells the kind of story that very few other titles would ever be willing to tell... The story where, no matter how hard you fight, no matter how much of your pride is on the line, sometimes it’s better to give in, to settle, and to eat shit and like the taste, for the sake of preserving what’s precious to you. I don’t normally see realism as a mark of quality, but this is realism done right, with no attempts to manipulate the audience beyond the simple message it tries to convey, and it used its themes and symbols so well that they’ve survived in the medium ever since, even when being clumsily ripped off.

Grave of the Fireflies was originally available from Central Park Media, but is now widely available on bluray and DVD by Sentai filmworks. I’m pretty sure it’s the only title from Ghibli to not be currently owned by Gkids, but don’t quote me on that. There’s also a 17-movie DVD collection floating around online that’s gained an absurd amount of popularity on Facebook, but trust me, it’s a Malaysian bootleg, your mileage of which may vary. The original short story by Akiyuki Nosaka is not available in English, nor is the live action remake from 2005. If you’re looking for an anime that specifically explores the famous atomic bombings, then check out Barefoot Gen.

You may remember me stating in a previous review that I’m not a huge fan of Studio Ghibli, as the majority of their work doesn’t really speak to me. I mentioned that I only really loved four of them, and after Only Yesterday and My Neighbor Totoro, this is absolutely a member of that list. It’s not my personal favorite, but it’s one of the only two Ghibli films that I’d feel confidant in calling a masterpiece. Aside from it’s cultural relevance, timeless story, important social commentary and powerful emotional resonance, it’s just not like any other movie there is. It’s not the first movie to not have a true villain, nor is it the first movie to showcase the dangers of pride and hubris, but it’s easily the only movie I’ve ever seen that’s able to deconstruct the same values that would be noble or inspirational in any other movie and put a more realistic spin on them, with such a frank depiction of how they would turn out. I’ve heard people criticize it for being emotionally manipulative tragedy porn, but i’d have to respectfully disagree. I give Grave of the Fireflies a 10/10.

War is Hell. These words, famously spoken by Union soldier William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War, have lived on ever since, and they’ve been used on many occasions to describe the bloodshed and rampant loss of life that can happen when nations engage each other in combat. It’s probably one of the most apt metaphors ever constructed by man, but what if it were to obtain a literal definition as well? What if there was a war that actually involved the forces of hell, with actual demons fighting both against and alongside the human race? This is exactly what ... happened in the Vaalbinill war, a conflict where mankind used a powerful magic to turn human sacrifices into powerful demonically-possessed swords called... Well, Demon swords. To do this, a human on the verge of death must read the death song that every person has hidden inside them, which creates a contract for them to sign... One that binds their souls to a magically enhanced sword... Only a few of which can take human form afterwards.

Alas, this war ended forty-four years ago, when the warring nations realized the damage these demon swords were causing, and reached a peace treaty to prevent the collateral damage from reaching a point of no return. Now, in the present day, the stories of demons and sacrifice have faded into legend, and people are just trying to get by, with very few reminders of the conflict left to haunt them. One of these, a demented homeless veteran of the war, is creating a scene in the middle of the marketplace when Cecily Campbell, a third generation knight who has vowed to protect the city and uphold justice in her late father’s name, is almost killed by this man before a quiet boy with a strange curved sword saves her from him. Realizing his occupation as a blacksmith, Cecily becomes determined to convince him to make her a sword that’s just like his... A katana, the sort of weapon from a faraway land, which she believes will aid her in her quest of heroism. He refuses, but she’ll have to find a way to change his mind, as the past has rapidly began to catch up to their land, and Cecily’s courage will soon be needed more than ever before.

Sacred Blacksmith was produced by Media Factory, who, incidentally, are also directly related to MF Bunko J, the company who published it’s light novels. Both companies are located under the umbrella of the Kadokawa Group, and from what I could tell from Media Factory’s Wikipedia page, they mostly do small jobs for other production companies, especially to Studio Gonzo and TMS. Out of the titles I actually knew, I couldn’t find any anime credited to them that had their name listed as their primary producer, with the soul exception to this being 2009’s The Sacred Blacksmith, and if that’s indicative of the larger truth, then thank God, because this show looks a bit on the mediocre side. Maybe that’s kind of mean of me, because I’ve definitely seen a lot worse looking anime than this over the years, but it’s kind of obvious that they had a small budget to work with, and it looks like they probably didn’t know how to handle such a hindrance in such a way that it wouldn’t be too noticeable.

I don’t know what bothers me more... How cheap this show looks, or how commonly cheap it looks, as it carries a lot of the same visual problems that an anime from the late 2000’s is likely to have. It tries to juggle it’s budge responsibly, with minimal movement being featured whenever possible in order to save more money for action scenes, but those stationary scenes look lazy as hell, as characters freeze almost right into the background when they’re not talking or reacting to anything, and they often do so while just slightly off-model enough to create an uncanny valley sensation, and the action scenes aren’t great either. They’re plagued by close-ups and zoom effects to make it look like you’re not just cutting from one stationary image to the other, and while this doesn’t always look too bad, especially if the villain of said scene is represented by some pretty decent CG animation, the amount of cut corners is telling. Backgrounds can be nice and highly detailed, especially when taking place in the market, but that doesn’t save the characters inhabiting them from looking stiff and lifeless.

In terms of the visuals, the only thing about this show that really gives it any sense of identity is the design of the main character, Cecily Campbell, who almost seems like she was drawn to catch the eye, what with her striking shade of red hair and highly questionable knight’s armor that looks like it was specifically molded in such a way as to accentuate her breasts(we’ll get to that). With the exception of the Demon Sword characters, who look like support characters taken from various Final Fantasy games, everyone else looks pretty generic, from the titular blacksmith, who’s only real memorable feature is the fact that his left eye is always shaded differently from his right eye(there’s a reason for it) to the villain, who... And I realize this is a spoiler, but come on, who wouldn’t see this coming... Is of course a sinister looking guy with long white hair. This is an anime, damn it, and you should expect things like that by now. The non-human villains look pretty good, especially the CG ones, but we don’t get very many of them.

I didn’t really notice the music while watching the series, but I never had any complaints about it either, which I guess is a good thing. The opening is your standard rock anthem, with Mayumi Goto belting out lyrics about virtue, triumph over evil and the struggle to do so, and while it’s pretty generic, it sounds nice. Some of the show’s best and worst animation is showcased during the video, clumsily moving between stiff characters in the middle of breathtakingly beautiful backgrounds to characters awkwardly trying to move against said backgrounds. A lot of the same could be said for the ending song, miracle happy day, which is also nice but generic. I like how each song is meant to represent a different character, with the opening representing Cecily and the ending representing little Lisa, but the latter has the added benefit of also being the character’s actual voice actor. As for the rest of the score, it was composed by Terashima Tamaya, and it’s pretty cool overall, especially the epic Kishi no Hokori. The sound is appropriately medieval, with a lot of drums and wind instruments at play.

While the music and animation may not be quite good enough to make an impression on you, the English dub is another story entirely. Funimation did a fantastic job on this one, to the point that even at some of it’s worst moments, the quality of the acting can still get you through. While these titles are by no means her first starring roles, it wasn’t until Strike Witches that she started to become a big name in the industry, and her role in The Sacred Blacksmith came right on the heels of that, and if anything, it proved that she could carry a series while moving away from more diminutive characters. It combines her likeability, strength and sincerity in such a way that it feels almost like a precursor to some of her future roles, like Lucy in Fairy Tail, Asuna in Sword Art Online and Ilia in RWBY. From what I’ve read, the character of Cecily was a really unpopular one in the original sub, with fans reacting negatively to her due to her big, grandiose talk and seeming inability to back it up, but Cherami’s performance does a lot to alleviate that issue and saves the character, even at her worst in the early episodes.

I’m normally not a huge fan of Blake Shephard, but he does a pretty damn good job as the titular Blacksmith, Luke Ainsworth. The character is supposed to be really cynical and blase, which Blake captures really well with his lack of intonation and devil-may-care attitude, adding in just enough hopeful or long-suffering vibes whenever necessary. Monica Rial plays his assistant, a cheerful little girl character who’s generally happy-go-lucky and annoyingly obsessed with his love life, and while this may sound like the kind of role Monica normally gets typecast into... And it is... Her casting was NOT a frivolous decision, nor was it just-another-paycheck for her. She does a lot with this character, and deserves praise for it. Anastacia Munoz plays the demon sword Ilia, and she does a great job, but oh what the hell, I’m just glad to see her. I’m a huge fan, and she doesn’t get enough work. The rest of Funimation’s usual squad of regulars show up at some point or another, with some highlights including Alexis Tipton as a spurned princess, Brina Palencia as a tragic victim of fate, and Colleen Clinkenbeard and J Michael Tatum as probably the only choices that could have made the boring villains more interesting.

And speaking of making things more interesting, that’s exactly the kind of task that Funimation had in front of them when they acquired this anime, which is probably why, when they announced the upcoming release, they were not the slightest bit coy about the fact that there’d be nudity in the release that wasn’t there in the original TV run. I don’t know if that nudity was censored on TV or if Funi just edited it in, but whatever the case, it’s really telling that they went to such great lengths to advertise the presence of some unobscured boobs, although as many forum-dwellers noted back then, it was probably due to the lack of interest that people had for the title. It’s true that nudity can be used well, and be an essential or at least acceptable part of a story, but in this case, it was very obviously being used as a crutch in order to help sales of the title, much like they wound up doing years later when they accidentally released the censored version of Sankarea; Undying love a few years later.

Now, at first glance, if you’re coming in blind and just looking up the plot synopsis and descriptions of the series, it looks like you’d be in for something awesome. It’s a show about knights and demons in a feudal setting, starring a cute and well-endowed female protagonist, and it deals with the introduction of katanas into a western society. There’s a lot of potential there, and you could be excused for going in with some pretty high expectations, even to the point that you’d probably be willing to look past the sub-par animation quality. The katana worship kind of suggests that there’d be some element of eastern influence creeping into the show’s western setting, or that Luke would have some kind of foreign background that could be explored, or hell, even the plot about the war that took place decades prior to the events of the series could have amounted to some kind of interesting intrigue. What I’m saying here is that there was a lot of room for cool ideas, and while they may have possibly been exploited to some extent in the source material, they weren’t here.

Right off the bat, this series shows signs of disappointment from pretty much all corners, from the bullshit about swords cutting through other swords to the fact that anything cool about the art of blacksmithing would be largely glossed over in favor of magical weapon creation. The plot and setting are extremely derivative and offer nothing new or unique to stand out against the thousands of feudal-type anime out there, and the villain is about as boring as you can get. I don’t even remember what his plan was, and I seriously didn’t care about any scenes dealing with the effects of said plan. It takes a special kind of failure to make small demons popping out of peoples’ mouths boring, but that’s where we are here, and the main characters aren’t much better. Cecily and Luke are trapped in a will-they-won’t-they dynamic that never goes anywhere, not that you’d WANT it to, you just want it to go literally anywhere else so you don’t have to listen to their inane bickering and cliched nonsense.

Part of this is of course Cecily herself, who appears to be some kind of joke character, preaching idealistic virtues like justice and compassion, self-sacrifice and heroism, all while proving herself to be ridiculously incompetent, having to be saved at every turn and not being taken seriously by just about anyone. She kind of reminds me of the protagonist of Now and Then, Here and There, but taken completely out of context to her own detriment. Her relationship with Luke is full of pure cringe, as she plays the rough, brutish tsundere to his asexual jerk, flashing boob and berating him for accidentally seeing it, blushing and fervently denying any feelings for him when called out, and most insulting of all, trying to weasel out of paying for the katana she wants him to make. Cap all of this off with a little girl obsessed with playing matchmaker and pointing out how generously well-endowed Cecily is, you’ve got what looks on the surface to be a jumbled mess of bland, cliched elements that nobody was asking for all merged into one show.

So, is there anything in this show that makes it worth watching? I think so, but this is the part where things are going to get a bit uncertain. If there’s anything interesting about this series, then it’s not in the text, but in the subtext, or at least out of what I could read into it. Now keep in mind that this is an entirely speculative interpretation of the material, so take it with a grain of salt, because there’s quite a bit to unload here. I didn’t start to pick apart any kind of deeper meaning to this series until the character ilia was introduced(at which point the series does manage to get quite a bit better, assuming you were able to make it that far in the first place) but when I did, I started noticing some very specific subtext, from which I managed to work backwards and figure out the over-all theme of the story, and I’m actually quite confidant about this part of it(my interpretation gets a little shakier later on), where the main unifying idea of the Sacred blacksmith seems to be the importance of self-identity, especially when compared to the indentities placed upon you by others.

This idea is explored in some surprisingly diverse ways, with the most obvious being the storyline between Luke and Lisa, but that’s kinda of heavy with the spoilers, so I’d instead like to start off with Charlotte, a young girl who begins to make trouble for our heroes halfway through the series. She declares that she’s a princess, the bastard daughter of the king, and demands her rightful place for the sake of her late mother. She instead gets refused by her father, and at the end of her arc(mild spoiler alert) she instead abandons her royal lineage and defects to another nation. This may sound like defeat, but think about what she was trying to do... She was trying to fulfill the dreams of her mother and gain the approval of her father, but was either of those goals what she wanted? What would avenging her deceased mother or proving herself to her father have done for her? I mean, there’s obviously the idea of attaining wealth and status as royalty, but she doesn’t show any interest in that. Instead, she dropped the Royal title from her name and started over on her own terms, choosing to define herself as an individual.

There’s also the demon swords, three of which can turn into humans... Well, four, but we only spend any time with three of them... And they all seem to fall into the same category, as characters who are burdened with the identities thrust upon them by their creators. Even the chant that they use to change form explicitly states that their purpose is to slay God, which could be read in exactly that way. While two of them are also heavily rooted in spoilers, I think we can talk about the first one, ilia, the demon sword who possesses the power of wind. Ilia has been around since the great war, where she was born on the battlefield, and she’s been responsible for countless deaths, the lives of which were taken by her wielders as well as by people wanting to become her wielder, killing said wielder and taking their place. She’s sick of being used as a tool of murder, which is why her life changes so drastically when she forges a partnership with the idealistic Cecily, who... Oh dear, it’s time to start talking about her now.

Okay, so, this is the part where it really becomes a stretch, so bear with me. The idea of self-identity gets a lot more complicated with Cecily, as it also starts to creep into the territory of sexual identity and gender identity, yeah, it’s that kind of show. Cecily is a character who’s trying really hard to find out where she belongs inbetween the masculine and feminine aspects of her personality. Unlike Charlotte, who wants to become a princess for the sake of her mother, Cecily becomes a knight for the sake of her father, even though such an occupation is explicitly shown to be male-dominated, and she’s never taken seriously as a member of their ranks, facing both condescension and open resentment for trying to do what’s considered a man’s job. I’d even go as far as to assume that her breast plate was molded specifically for the purpose of accentuating the shape of her bosom, as the military considers her more of a mascot or a PR stunt than an actual knight, and in all fairness, she doesn’t do much to prove them wrong.

Now, I’m not the kind of person who sees a sword in a story and says “That’s a dick,” unless I’m making a joke about Bleach or something, but that old symbolism cliche does kind of fit in this case, when you consider just how unsuccessful Cecily is while trying to wield them in her attempts at doing what’s considered men’s work. Either they break in her hands, or she flat-out refuses to kill, which is both suggestive of compassion which is a traditionally feminine trait, and on a more low-brow note, a sign of impotence. Yes, I am also including the fact that she’s unable to get the main male character to ‘erect’ a sword for her in my analysis, and you’re welcome for that. Keep in mind, though, she’s just as bad with feminine pursuits, as she’s uncomfortable with the idea of drawing attention to her looks, and she fails hard at performing house work, and she’s really awkward in any sort of feminine clothes, so it could be said that both masculine and feminine ideals are waiting just out of her grasp.

Having said all of that, she doesn’t start to grow as a character, to gain more confidence both socially and in battle, until she acquires a female partner who acts as a sword for her, and she’s finally able to perform successfully. Granted, there’s no actual confession of love or confirmed affection between her and Ilia, but it’s still really easy to read their relationship as a romantic one, with some seriously Utena-esque subtext to back it up. There are several lines of dialogue that seem to almost deliberately imply something deeper than friendship, although that could have just been Funimation rewriting things. I don’t know how things between Luke and Cecily went in the source material, but it’s typically not my style to look into things like that, and Cecily really does seem to grow and develop as a person after her and Ilia form their partnership. Granted, this doesn’t really go anywhere special, as Ilia’s insistence on Cecily continuing to pursue Luke does kind of echo the very Japanese idea of lesbianism being a teenage phase, but I’m just the interpreter, I didn’t write the damn show.

So, to summarize, The Sacred Blacksmith seems to insist that you can’t become a complete person until you come to terms with your own identity, and in order to do that, you shouldn’t live by other peoples’ standards, you shouldn’t live for the approval or fulfillment of your parents, you shouldn’t try to be more of a man, you shouldn’t try to be more of a woman, you shouldn’t try to live up to the role society has placed on you, and you shouldn’t live according to the rules of your creator... You are you, and you shouldn’t lose sight of who you are and what you want. And what if I’m just pulling all of this out of my ass? What if I’m just reading too far into the material and seeing what I want to see? Well, that’s incredibly likely, but it would be a damn shame, because that added depth is really the only thing this show has going for it. On it’s own merits, The Sacred Blacksmith is just about the blandest thing you’ll ever see, with it’s only real saving grace being that it gets less boring about a third of the way through, so I’ll stick to my interpretation, thank you very much.

Sacred Blacksmith is available from Funimation, now as a part of the SAVE collection. The original light novels are not available stateside, but the manga adaptation by Isao Miura are available from Seven Seas entertainment. It also makes a very brief cameo in the anime Haganai.

In a general sense, I want to like everything I watch, or at the very least, I want it to be worth liking, and since there really isn’t anything outright awful about this particular title, the fact that I’m able to read something deeper into it helps me to appreciate it perhaps a bit more than it actually deserves. It’s not one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen, not by far, but the fact that it’s not interestingly bad just adds to it’s lack of noteworthy qualities as part of the reason why I don’t think I’d ever recommend it to very many people. I guess you might like it if you’re a hardcore fan of either the feudal setting or of Cherami Leigh as an actor, or hell, maybe if you’re going through some crisis of identity and need to watch something that might help you affirm your own self-image, and maybe you’ll see the same subtext and symbolism that I did. Other than that, it’s not an outright bad anime, but it really doesn’t offer anything that you couldn’t find elsewhere in both bigger and better portions. I give The Sacred Blacksmith a 5/10.

Can we all just agree that dreams are fucking weird? They’re one of the least understood aspects of human life, and everybody but Mike Pence has them. Their are tons of theories about what their purpose is, what they mean, and why we’re always naked in them, but to this day, nobody can pinpoint what these bizarre movies we get to watch while we’re recharging even are. Sometimes they have purpose... Back when I was in a bad relationship where I felt trapped and with no control over my life, I’d constantly dream that I was stuck on a labyrinthian waterslide ... that I couldn’t escape from. But they can be completely nonsensical, too. Maybe you’re fighting in a war with flamethrowers, but they suddenly turn into waterguns. Maybe you’re running from a spider that can fit through any crack. Maybe you’re beating up pedophiles, taunting serial killers, throwing horses at witches, fighting demons in the wild west, meeting people you don’t see anymore, running from a golden car like it’s a metaphor for Satan, or hell, maybe you get into a car crash but wind up in your living room, with your family ominously telling you “It’s waiting.”

For little Nemo, dreams aren’t quite like that. Every single one of his dreams is a lucid one, and he can use them to escape to big fantastical worlds, all by riding on his bed like it’s a magic carpet. One day, after seeing a parade and wanting desperately to go to the circus, Nemo drifts off and is invited to the world of Slumberland, a country governed by a kind, jovial king and his prickly little daughter, and inhabited by a whole host of wild and zany characters. Nemo is declared the King’s heir, and entrusted with protecting it from harm, but it isn’t long at all before one of these inhabitants, a chain-smoking green minstrel named Flip, tempts him into letting Slumberland get taken over by a terrifying sea of darkness, which leaves it in shambles and takes the King away to a faraway land. With the order of a whole world now at stake, there is only one chance at saving it... Joined by Flip, the princess, a wacky professor and his talking squirrel sidekick, Nemo must brave the horrors of Nightmareland to make everything right again!

If I were to show you Little Nemo directly, there are two reactions I expect from you almost immediately. The first would be disbelief at the fact that Nemo’s not a clownfish(although his world is populated by Clowns), and incredulity at the fact that it really doesn’t look like an anime. It is, I assure you... It was produced by Japan and released in Japan three years before it was released in the States, although I’d say roughly a quarter of the people credited to making it are american, including both of the screenwriters. The production was a mess of almost legendary proportions, with huge names from both sides of the ocean coming into the project and then leaving it just as quickly, leaving influence behind but rarely ever any guidance on how to implement it. Even Hayao Miyazaki himself was attached at one point, which is probably why the movie opens with a sequence of Nemo flying through the city on his bed. It was ultimately produced by TMS, a company that made Akira and animated several american cartoons.

And speaking of american cartoons, that’s exactly what this movie was based on. Little Nemo was originally a newspaper comic that ran in the early 1900’s, which doesn’t sound like something an anime would ever be based on, and yet lo and behold, that’s what we have here. Visually, this is exactly what I’d think of if I was told that an anime was being designed to look like an American product. First of all, being that this WAS a product of TMS, the animation budget was high, so there’s a lot of fluid animation and graceful character movement, sometimes almost to a fault. It is very lively, and it makes the movie feel really energetic, but there’s also a certain feeling of over-indulgence to it, like what the Nostalgia Critic might call movement porn. It never stops moving, which can almost feel exhausting at points. It’s one of those cases where something was new at the time, and had never really been attempted to such a degree, so of course it was impressive at the time for what it achieved, but looking back, it could have been done better.

For example, there’s a scene where the cast engages in a dance at the palace, and Professor Genius starts doing a weird dance(I’d be surprised if The Duke of Wesselton wasn’t at least partially inspired by this), and then the king joins in, and for this strangely surreal moment, it looks like the two are moving in synch, probably through some sort of rotoscoping, despite being at least a foot apart in height. It’s a really creepy bit of Uncanny valley. Oh, and speaking of uncanny valley, there’s also the facial animations, which I actually kind of had trouble watching. Characters were so far removed from your typical anime style that it honestly looks like something Chuck Jones would have animated while shit-face drunk, and this is reflected in the character designs. Most of the characters look all right, if a bit generic, but the animation doesn’t always work in their favor. Princess Camille, for example? Whenever she lets her shoulders slump, she looks more arrow than human. She looks like the love child of Bob Belcher and Marzipan from the Homestarrunner cartoons. At least the demons look cool, I guess.

When it comes to the music, I was actually kind of expecting the American and Japanese releases to have different soundtracks, but surprisingly, they don’t. Even though this movie was originally released in Japan, the OST was comprised of English language songs. On Wikipedia, the music is credited to a few American sounding names, including the Sherman Brothers, who are absolute legends in the field of family film musical scores. The film’s main theme, which is simply named Little Nemo after the Japanese title of the movie, is beautiful. I love it. It works great in the film, carrying the kind of epic whimsy that can only be found in nineties children’s movies, and it’s just as strong when listened to on it’s own. Melissa Manchester has an amazing voice, which I really shouldn’t have to tell anyone who’s familiar with her work, and it’s a testament to her strength as an artist that she can carry the Sherman Brothers occasionally awkward and flowery lyrics without ever sounding hokey or condescending.

Unfortunately, this mark of inspiration doesn’t really carry over to the rest of the soundtrack, which sounds about as standard for a generic children’s movie soundtrack that you can get, with some of the songs being directly attached to scenes that were clearly added to the film just to pad out the run time. This is no more clear than with the song Etiquette, which I think was supposed to be funny, but just winds up coming off as annoying. Melissa Manchester is nowhere to be found on this track, but she might not have been able to save it anyway, because she wasn’t able to carry her majesty from Little Nemo over to the song Slumberland, which is just kind of boring over-all. Songs like Fun and Laughter, The Boomps Song and Princess of Slumberland are safe, saccharine and forgettable, which is sadly par for the course with this soundtrack. The instrumental tracks are okay, but they’re not the kind of thing that could ever set the world on fire, and there’s nothing about them that really justifies going out of your way to find them.

The English dub is... Well, it’s also okay. There are a ton of really popular names credited to this film, including a pre-Simpsons Nancy Cartwright and a post-Vampire Hunter D Michael McConnohie. Actually, there area ton of voice actors attached to this project whose resumes would surprise you, as even beyond famous names like Tress Macneille, Jennifer Darling, Sherry Lynn and the late June Foray, there are names that may have flown under your radar like René Auberjonois and Gabriel Damon, and I’m sad to say this, almost none of them brought their A-game to this project. There are a few exceptions, like Laura Mooney in the role of the Princess, who was the only cast member who CLEARLY wasn’t trying; Bernard Erhard, who put his heart and soul into making King Morpheus the most likeable guy in the world, and strangely enough Mickey Rooney, who was obviously having a blast playing the mischievous and duplicitous Flip. It’s not a great dub, but it’s passable enough, which is good, because western releases don’t include a Japanese language sub track.

So, here’s an interesting little bit of trivia for you guys: this was the first anime I ever watched. It predates my experiences with Pokemon and Dragonball by nearly a decade, even. When I was little, like really little, my Dad would often rent movies on VHS and bring them home for my brother and me to watch. He’d go to the grocery store... Wegmans, in my area... Rent somne random movie with a G rating and bring it home for us. For those of you who are confused by those last two sentences, ask your parents. He’d bring home Disney movies, Don Bluth movies, straight-to-video shitfests(I saw Once Upon a Forest at least three times), and on one occasion, Little Nemo. Now, as a kid, I didn’t have the greatest attention span, but I always found myself getting absorbed in stories. I watched movies mostly attentively, and shamed people who didn’t(To this day, I get really annoyed by people who play on their phones during a movie), and as soon as I learned to read, I could go hours without putting a book or comic down.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however, and Little Nemo is one of them. My memory’s not great, but I’m pretty sure I only saw it once, and didn’t really pay attention to it. Even only a year later, all I could remember about it was the Princess Camille stuff, because even Little Naru loved him some princesses. I only really wound up thinking about it a few tiomes in the years that followed, like one time when I was reading up on the history of newspaper comics, or when Finding Nemo came out, or when I found out it was an anime, or when The Nostalgia Critic and The Mysterious Mr. Enter did some really good videos on it, ... But I never really started thinking about it seriously until I started reviewing anime, and I knew I’d have to hit it again eventually. Well, almost five years in, that time has finally come. I bought the movie online, let it sit on my coffee table for a few months(don’t judge me) and finally, I popped it in and watched it for the first time in over twenty years, and let me tell you, there’s a reason it bored me as a kid.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so to stay focused, I’m not going to go too far into any of the behind the scenes stuff. Production of this film was famously a nightmare, it’s apparently one of Hayao Miyazaki’s worst professional experiences, it was a huge bomb when it was released, and the production company, TMS, who were riding high after the success of Akira at the time, were so badly damaged by it that they haven’t been the same since. I don’t personally know any more about any of this than I’ve been told, I haven’t exactly done any research into it’s history... That’s not really the kind of thing I do here... But it’s lack of success isn’t really a surprise to me, and if you’ve ever seen it yourself, it doesn’t take a lot of run time to pick up on the fact that it was never going to be anybody’s favorite film for any reason but childhood nostalgia. The only thing I can really talk about here is my personal experience watching the movie, and if it helps, my thoughts as to why it flopped as hard as it did.

First of all, the main character... The titular Nemo... Is a special kind of bland. He has no personality to speak of, he has no interests or goals outside of visiting the circus and doing whatever the plot tells him to do, and if I had to guess, his companion, a little sentient flying squirrel with flight goggles on his head, was added to the story to make him more interesting in the new medium(it didn’t work. also, how weird is it that they had June Foray in the cast, the voice of rocky, but she didn’t play his arguable rip-off?)). He just goes with the flow while spouting off lazy little boy one-liners like Yippee! Gee Whiz! and Wowwee! He doesn’t even immediately grasp that a princess is a girl, a conversation which... to be fair... Was even dumber in the NES game. The worst thing about him isn’t how boring or bland he is, however... It’s how little agency he has in the story. for the bulk of the movie, he’s just following orders, going along with whatever the other characters want him to do, and when Flip pressures him to go back on some of these orders, he folds like origami.

The first real choice he makes is to try and undo that mistake... about twenty minutes after making it. He gains some agency in the third act, where he’s leading the charge to the Nightmare castle to rescue everybody, but even then, it’s hard to get invested because you never feel that he has any connection to any of it. He’s only known any of these people for less than a day, the whole world is just shallow eye candy with nothing substantial to offer, and I’m sorry, but a king who’s willing to hand a key to what’s basically the doors of hell to a child he just met fifteen minutes ago was asking for his kingdom to get taken over. In stories like these, the hero has to have a personal reason to save the world he’s wandered into, but with Nemo, he just feels like our excuse to explore a bunch of Candyland backgrounds in a barely story-driven animation demo, and the moments of actual story feel either distractingly stupid or gratingly annoying. When Nemo is being tossed around by spastic tutors trying to educate him on proper behavior, I wouldn’t care if he woke up, got up to use the bathroom, and then went back to bed and dreamed about running from monster tornadoes. I’d be just as engaged.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that we KNOW he’s just having a dream, and that there’s no more to it than that. Right in the beginning of the movie, we see most of the characters from Slumberland walking down the street in a parade, which is how he came to dream about them. That’s it. They’re not real. None of this is real. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the dream-like aspects were the whole point, and it was just supposed to be a trippy experiences, but there’s a story and plot involved, and there’s almost no urgency behind any of it. If he fails, nothing is lost. If he succeeds, nothing is gained. There’s no interesting subtext, no metaphor to speak of, no commentary, just the classic artwork and imagination of Windsor McKay being shown off in a story that doesn’t do any of it justice. I mean, the only thing that does any work moving the plot forward is the character of Flip, but his motivation in the story is so completely bankrupt that he almost feels like the personification of the audience screaming “Get on with it!”

It doesn’t even manage to be dream-like. Like I said before, dreams are weird. They don’t have plots, they don’t contain full stories. Little Nemo is too conventional of a story to even grasp the surrealism that any good dream-based narrative should, at the very least, be able to pull off. Remember in Nichijou, when characters are put in bizarre situations like having to eat noodles off of a shoot before they hit the ground? Or having to buy a snowman off of the shelf before it melts, and they do so with actual sincerity, like they believe these tasks to be important? That’s how dreams work. Remember Alice in Wonderland, or the old Nightmare Ned computer game? That’s how dreams work. Okay, the Nightmare Ned TV series had consistent stories, but at least they had the benefit of being smart and well written. You wanna show me a dream with a solid narrative? Make a movie where someone has to deal with a cult of people who brainwash each other into mutilating the bone structure of their faces, or getting stuck in a pizza place that’s a metaphor for purgatory.

The actual story is bad enough, but there’s almost no creativity to the visuals, and while I get that the whole movie is based on a preexisting work, and they had established content to work with, but that shouldn’t have limited them so harshly. It’s an adaptation, but the concept surrounding it was just ripe for updates. They could have unleashed their imaginations upon the world, using McKay’s imagination as a pretty solid foundation for interpretation, but everything just feels so lazy and uninspired. The Slumberland sets basically went from Candyland to the ocean to a dark and dreary underworld, and a King of nightmares(or something) who just looked like Chernabog on a juice cleanse. That’s the best you got? Give me a demonic three headed goat or something(can you tell I crowd-sourced some weird dream ideas for this review?)! I haven’t been this disappointed since the villain in Insidious turned out to be Darth Maul’s edge-lord little cousin! There are so many ways this movie could have been great, but sadly, they didn’t take any of them.

Little Nemo, which has the additional subtitle of Adventures of Slumberland over here, is way out of print, but the Easternstar DVD is still really easy to find online for cheap. The original comic is also easy to find online, but it ain’t cheap, and the books they’re contained in tend to be gigantic, and can be a pain to display because of it. The entire Little Nemo franchise is in the public domain, so if you want to use it for yourself, you can do so without issue.

When I reviewed Spirited Away, I went into detail on my revised feelings towards children’s media, and that a movie doesn’t necessarily have to be critically good for kids to watch it. The only exception is when a movie teaches a bad message or could potentially provide a negative influence, and there’s nothing like that in Little Nemo, so do I recommend showing it to your kids? I guess so, but I can’t honestly see them asking to see it. It’s a fairly obscure movie, and if it didn’t develop a huge cult following after getting put out on DVD early this decade, then I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. If you have fond childhood memories of it and want to show it to your kids for that reason, go ahead, but there’s no guarantee they’ll like it. I certainly didn’t. That aside, it’s a pretty firmly forgotten movie, and while I’d love to see someone else take a shot at adapting McKay’s opus... come on Disney, this shit has your name all over it... This is one nostalgic movie you can leave right in your memories where it belongs. I give Little Nemo a 3/10.