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It's one thing for this show to queerbait me, but to do it twice? To do it the second time while switching from a love interest who had a developed and meaningful connection with the protagonist, to one who is basically just an impossible-to-read weirdo that no-one in their right mind would be in love with? Awful. Combine that with excessive focus on interpersonal drama between marginal characters with very little payoff or meaning, and a general lack of focus on what should be the crux of the anime - the craft of music itself - and what you get is a waste of time.

Looks ... great, though!

I guess the point of this movie is supposed to be that as we grow up, we have interactions with each other that are awkward and melodramatic and which can end badly, because we're unable to be honest about our feelings or considerate about the feelings of others. And once we grow up, we can revisit those feelings and realise what motivated the way we behaved when we were younger. But I think there are probably better ways to express that idea than by writing a story where a girl who is impossible to like (seemingly on purpose) jerks around the nice, kind, totally normal ... protagonist for 40 minutes, only for us to find out that they were really in love the whole time once they have a post-high school reunion.

At least it looks nice.

Gunbuster is a strange mixture of parodically cliched, half-assed storytelling and subversive, dramatically-powerful moments.

Some of this is obviously intentional, mainly the first two episodes, which are aping sports-anime tropes from Aim for the Ace! such as the klutzy-but-hardworking underdog protagonist, the idolised perfect older-sister figure, and the jealous rival, as well as the taciturn coach with unshakable belief. (Note that the intentional parody doesn't make these parts any less boring or annoying.)

However, other instances of this contrast are difficult to understand. For example, despite its bizarrely detailed depiction of "hard" sci-fi concepts like time dilation, the anime barely makes any real effort at fleshing ... out its setting and premise - the central conflict in the story is between humanity and mysterious "space monsters" about whom virtually nothing is ever learned, and whose enmity to humanity is never adequately explained.

Despite the commonplace nature of mechas as a weapon, scenes of training or military maneuvers rarely evidence any attempt by the writers to actually think about the implications of using them - Noriko, for example, seems to train more by just running around or lifting weights than by actually piloting her mech. The incongruous sight of mechs doing push-ups or running around on the ground is commonplace, despite how useless it would be to practice these things for a space battle. Although the entirety of Earth is presumably allied in fighting the space monsters, we rarely see any kind of international coalition of forces that would indicate the scale of such an effort - the sole "foreign" presence is a completely useless fanservice character who's hilariously named "Jung Freud".

Given that the series is only six episodes, it can be excused for not depicting a drawn-out military conflict with twists and turns, although it's quite repetitive to have the two major climaxes of the series both revolve around the strategy of "go into the middle of the enemy forces with a big bomb, run away, and detonate it". But the makers could have scrapped many of the pathetic fanservice bathing scenes in favour of trying to flesh out the world and the details of the situation instead, and they don't do that.

At this point it's worth mentioning what's actually good about it. It has excellent art - with the exception of a 6-7 minute stretch in the last episode where the presumably cash-strapped Gainax staff tried to be arty by panning over still frames instead of animating them, the animation is generally fluid and crisp, and the visual impact of the anime is always engrossing.

There are several genuinely engrossing battle sequences, the first of which is quite subversive in that instead of showing Noriko effortlessly carving through the enemy as another anime might, it shows her freezing up and unable to do anything due to the shock and fear of being in a battle for the first time.

For some reason, despite being totally uninterested in any of the other sci-fi elements of its premise, Gunbuster is very interested in the idea of time dilation resulting from lightspeed/near-lightspeed travel. It puts this concept to use in several very strong scenes, where the pathos comes from people knowing that they're going out into space on a journey and will come back with everyone they know having grown old or died, or from Noriko coming back after what - for her - was six months, to find that ten years passed on Earth, and everything has moved on from her. This part of Gunbuster is probably its greatest strength.

If every other element of Gunbuster was written with the attention and interest that's given to the scenes involving time dilation, then it would probably be perfect and an undeniable classic. As it stands, the anime oscillates wildly between sloppy, lazy melodrama and genuinely interesting, emotionally affecting sci-fi. Which averages out to around a 6.

It takes until the fifteenth page of the first chapter till the protagonist Rei speaks. Before then, he's woken up from an unpleasant dream, mechanically dressed himself, walked through the city, and arrived at his appointment to play his stepfather in a professional shogi match. Rei beats him, but refuses to answer the usual fatherly questions - "How have you been? Have you been eating properly?". Seemingly resigned, the last thing his stepfather says before leaving is "Ayumu and Kyoko have been very worried about you". Once alone, Rei only says one word in response: "Liar". The overwhelming impression throughout the first half of ... the chapter is one of enigmatic sadness and loneliness, of a young man - a kid, really, in a deep depression, barely living his life.

After getting up and leaving, he is aimlessly wandering the streets before he gets a text from his friend, Akari Kawamoto, the oldest of three Kawamoto sisters, asking him to get them some groceries for dinner. Once he gets to their cramped little home, the silent, washed-out scenes of urban solitude which filled the chapter to this point are replaced by a bright, cluttered and cheerful atmosphere, like an oasis of happiness in his misery. He has dinner, and then goes to sleep right there in their house. He cries in his sleep.

The first chapter left me with an overwhelming impression both of the silence and loneliness of Rei's sterile life, and the kindness and warmth he was lucky enough to find with the Kawamotos, which seemed to rescue him. At this point, I didn't know where that sadness came from, but I was interested enough to read on so I could find out. The delicate and restrained style appealed to me, as did as Rei's internal monologue, where he would reflect on how he felt and on his situation. So as I read on, I was mostly interested in finding out what made him like this, and in seeing whether his connection to the Kawamotos could help him find some happiness.

In these respects, the manga completely delivers. We find out all about what made Rei this way, in some incredibly poignant flashbacks intercut with his present-day musings on how he's trying to deal with that pain. At the same time, he also begins to grow up a little, coming out of his timid, depressed, inward-looking shell and beginning to stand up for himself and pursue something meaningful in his life for the sake of his connections with others. He makes friends and acquires the respect of others, and he learns from them - not just his elders or mentor-figures in the Shogi association, but most notably from the younger Kawamoto sister, Hinata. As he learns and grows, he begins to deal in a more healthy way with the crushing psychological weight of his childhood miseries and his present circumstances. This journey happens in fits and starts, with setbacks and times where he lapses into depression again, as well as with incredible leaps. It's a lot like life.

At the same time, the "circle" of the manga expands to include people on the periphery. We meet and become invested in a diverse cast of Shogi players with their own ambitions, personal histories and struggles, such as Rei's best friend Harunobu, or their senpai-figure Shimada, as well as Rei's wonderfully honest and passionate high school teacher Hayashida. There are arcs in the manga which move away from Rei entirely and focus on Shimada, or on the 66-year-old A-rank shogi player Yanigahara as he reflects on the strange position of being the oldest active player and being treated by many around him as if he will soon disappear or as if he only exists to vet the youngsters, although he still desperately believes he has more of himself to burn. Despite only knowing Yanigahara for a few chapters, the mangaka masterfully compresses his struggles into vivid images of burnt fields and a man draped in sashes representing the hopes of all who have gone before him, in a way that poignantly communicates the essential truth of who he is.

As the manga goes on, it certainly changes, in that it expands its cast, it pursues new storylines, it depicts dramatic and romantic conflicts, and the characters evolve. But its core appeal for me has always remained the same. The delicate, relaxed pace with which it depicts life, the poignant and heartbreaking honesty of its emotional moments, the brilliance of Umino's visual metaphors and how they perfectly illustrate the psychological states of its characters, and the earned optimism with which it follows them as they grow and heal from their wounds, all remain, and make it worth loving.

There's a very specific kind of enjoyment which you can get from Reincarnated as a Slime, and the best comparison I can make - which might explain that enjoyment - is to time-loop movies. Movies like The Edge of Tomorrow or Source Code focus on an initially-incompetent protagonist being repeatedly put through the same sequence of events in the same place and trying to achieve some kind of goal.

At the beginning, the protagonist repeatedly fails or dies because they don't know what's coming next. But eventually, they begin to map out the possibilities and anticipate the events in their reality, and figures out the ... best way to get through the obstacles, or the right thing to do at the right time, in order to succeed. And at the point that the protagonist has finally managed to git gud, you get a vicarious sense of enjoyment from watching them.

That's pretty much what Slime is like, except, crucially, without the first part - which is to say, the part where the protagonist actually struggles. This basically turns the anime into a weirdly fun, oddly amusing journey through a fairly stereotypical isekai setting where the protagonist constantly makes the right choices, level-grinds (so to speak) in order to get all the powerful abilities he needs to consistently destroy his opponents, makes the right alliances to build up his kingdom, etc. If he was some kind of stereotypically handsome cool guy, this would probably be really annoying, but he's a literal slime, so it just becomes oddly funny to watch him take over a goblin village and turn it into a built-up town which is home to a multi-species coalition, or to befriend a legendary storm dragon just by being around and not being scared to talk to him.

If this sounds undistinguished and like it might be kind of boring, that's because it probably would be, which is why I decided to be fair and give it 5 out of 10. Certainly, after the entertaining early parts where Rimuru the Slime consistently wrecks every opponent he faces and becomes the founder of a new nation, there's a deeply shitty final arc where he has to babysit a bunch of annoying kids, which sucks. However, if you have nothing else to do and find isekai kind of annoying, it might be fun to watch a show where a super-powerful slime basically rampages through an isekai setting just by being smart, having a bunch of rare abilities, and using his common sense.

The Garden of Words is the most aesthetically beautiful anime I've ever seen. The combination of minute detail and the modelling of reflected and refracted light in sun and rain creates something which has beauty in every frame, which makes you constantly pause it to appreciate frames as still images.

Much as its visual beauty comes from a careful, slightly glossy depiction of the real world, the film seems to have aimed to bring out the same poetry-of-the-ordinary concept in its story and its characters. Two lonely, somewhat lost and unsure people meet coincidentally because they both like to skive off their responsibilities when it ... rains in the mornings and go to watch the rain and light play on a garden pond. Slowly, they begin to understand a little more about each other and connect, opening up to each other as they don't to anyone else.

The main character, Takao, is a high school student in (more or less) modern Japan who wants to be a shoemaker, the sort of quirky ambition which combines nostalgic outdatedness with a half-artistic/half-blue-collar feel. His chosen profession figures into the film in a couple of significant ways - since it's more than a little odd, it leaves him feeling lonely and alienated because he feels people would laugh at his dream, and it becomes a metaphor for the way he helps Yukino, the mysterious and secretly-traumatised older woman he meets, to "walk", to stand up for herself and engage with life again.

This is a sufficiently promising premise to become something special if put in the hands of a keen observer of human connections - someone who can realistically write the conversations a 15-year-old and a 27-year-old might have in the context, and find the spark for their growing relationship. The problem is, Shinkai isn't all that keen an observer, preferring the glossy, artificial perfection of montages that conveniently skip to the required moments in their continued friendship - Takao tells Yukino he wants to be a shoemaker but is frustrated in this, Yukino offers to let him use her feet to model the shoes, they share food, etc - in order to give you the digested version of what would surely have been a far more complex narrative (especially given what we learn about who Yukino is), with a lot more hesitation on both sides.

Sometimes a lean film is good, but at 46 minutes, The Garden of Words is simply rushed. This doesn't ruin it, but it does ensure that it can't be better than quite good, as it fails to find anything insightful or specific to say about how strangers can fall in love with each other due to shared loneliness; it just assumes they will if they're both nice enough and lonely enough, and cuts in a great many gorgeous shots of pouring rain on flowers and trees with serene piano music to convince you of the illusion.

One of the most relatable, keenly-observed, and emotionally realistic depictions in anime of a boy's coming of age is also a story about how a space pirate who steals star systems is set free from interdimensional jail to stop giant irons from flattening the creases in planet Earth. This is not a contradiction.

FLCL is many things. It's hilarious, running the gamut of humour from the opening slapstick of Haruko ramming into Naota with her moped, to the chaotic character-based humour of normal people trapped in absurd situations (Naota) and abnormally perverted people (Naota's dad and granddad) lapsing into gibberish as their overheated brains process the ... idea of an affair between Naota and and the lovely young woman who's invaded their house, to the constant surreal innuendo of Naota's repressed sexual impulses manifesting as phallic horns from his forehead. FLCL's refusal to conform to either reality or a consistent style allows it to turn into manga, South Park, and a John Woo movie whenever it feels like ramping up the ridiculousness of any given premise.

It's gorgeous, with some of the smoothest animation delivered by the medium before or since, offbeat but beautifully-drawn character designs, a wealth of sci-fi monsters and robots, and an unerring eye for the striking image - see Canti leaping onto the roof of the burned-out school and sending a spire of light into the air as the birds explode out of the building and fly up around him, or Naota silhouetted against the burning horizon, holding his guitar. The team puts in a hundred percent, enlivening the most standard scenes with a fresh approach: see a late-series scene where Naota's dad and grandad are interrogating him on his feelings about Haruko. It could have been drawn side-on from beginning to end, but the camera is an at extreme angle looking up from below them, to enhance how grotesque the perverted adults look as they tower over Naota and question him.

Nobody slacked off on FLCL; while it has its share of semi-still frames with overdubbed conversation as people sit and talk, this isn't done out of laziness, but to emphasise the drowsy summer haze that hangs over the city of Mabase, turning everything golden and shimmering, so that - despite how ridiculous it is - you kind of get why Naota keeps saying "Nothing amazing happens here. Only the ordinary", even as giant robots keep coming out of his head.

Despite how wacky FLCL is, it never loses the atmosphere that makes it feel so nostalgic and true to childhood summer memories, where the days seem to stretch out forever and you - much like Naota - can't wait to grow up, even as there's a sense of melancholy for the innocence you're leaving behind. Using the pillows for the soundtrack was an inspired choice. The songs complement it perfectly, from the threatening buzzsaw guitars of "Stalker" that underscore the sci-fi monsters to the brief moments of pure happiness that could scarcely be better echoed than by "Beautiful morning with you", or the plaintive strains of "One Life" under Naota's sobbing melancholy - and it all comes together with (maybe - who can really pick?) my personal favourite, "Blues Drive Monster", which makes the spectacular giant-robot climax even cooler than it was to begin with.

It is, of course, thrilling. While the action is always on the cartoonish side, being more for the sake of entertainment and allegory than to actually ascertain "who's stronger", it's always brilliantly choreographed, fast-paced, and full of spectacular animation which magnifies the awe-inspiring sense of impact - see the aftermath, almost like a nuclear strike, of episode 4's climax, where Naota has to bat a falling satellite back into space before it levels the city.

On the level of pure entertainment, it's perfect, an unadulterated sugar rush. But if it was no more than that, it would be notable but not a masterpiece. What elevates it is the way all of its special effects bombast is put in the service of developing character and exploring psychology - mostly Naota's, though it applies to Mamimi and Ninamori and even Haruko.

FLCL can come off as pretty opaque when you try to figure it out, because it's really not like almost any other anime. Rather than using conventional methods of exploring a character's feelings and motivations, such as putting them in a pressure-cooker situation till they blurt out confessions of how they feel, or having them pour out their hearts to conveniently-placed friends/relatives/agony aunts who exist to enable emotional exposition, FLCL tends to keep it a lot more subtle (which is an odd thing to say about an anime where giant horns sprouting from a boy's forehead represent his lust, but, wait), and use a lot of symbols and metaphors to clue you in.

(Unless you've seen FLCL, you'll be a little confused by this, and also spoiled on the plot, so read on with caution.)

Here are a few loosely-connected symbols and concepts which, in the impressionistic dream-logic of FLCL, explain what Naota's all about: his brother, Tasuku, who plays baseball; 'Tasukete', which means 'help me' or 'save me'; baseball bats; guitars; wanting to be an adult; adults who don't grow up; Mamimi, Tasuku's girlfriend; Naota's perverted dad; Haruko; and the Oedipus complex.

The first thing Naota says about Haruko is that she's "a stupid adult that's not mature enough to grow up". In episode three, he dismisses performing in a school play, because "school plays are for kids"; "You ARE a kid!", Ninamori retorts. Naota's dad is a grotesquely immature man-child who barely even attempts to take care of him. In episode 6, Naota's teacher visits the house and asks if his dad is worried that Naota's been abducted by their housekeeper. His dad doesn't care. But there was an older presence in his life that Naota looked up to to: his brother, Tasuku, who is gone now, leaving him all alone. Tasuku played baseball. Naota carries around a baseball bat and glove because he wants to be like his brother, but when push comes to shove, he won't swing it. Mamimi misses Tasuku, so she plays around unseriously with Naota, hugging and cuddling him; he knows she's using him as a substitute for his brother, and he resents it, but he has a crush on her, so it's painful but it still makes him a little happy.

Speaking of crushes, he has a major one on Haruko. Who does Haruko remind him of? When she swings the guitar into Canti in episode 1, he thinks to himself, shocked out of his affected adolescent detachment, that she looked like his brother - the only person he seems to respect and miss. What does Haruko do? She tries to make him swing the bat. Just carrying it around because it reminds him of Tasuku, wanting to be Tasuku, but being too afraid to swing the bat, is to be a child. Naota won't swing the bat. He's living in the amber haze of Mabase, trapped in childhood, desperately wanting to grow up, too scared of embarrassment and love and risk to do anything except sullenly tolerate Mamimi's caresses, run away from Ninamori's play, distance himself from Haruko, and refuse to swing the bat.

But Haruko said it. "Nothing can happen until you swing the bat."

Naota swings the bat - or at least, the guitar (which is rock and roll; it's even cooler than baseball; it's a penis; it's his self-worth; it's a whole bunch of things in one symbol) - and saves his town. In episode 2, he gets into trouble with the robots and says "Tasuk..." and you can't tell if he's saying "tasukete" ("save me") or calling for his brother. A symbol lights up Canti's face. It's a corrupted version of the Japanese symbol for - you guessed it, "Adult". But Tasuku's gone and Naota - just Takkun to Mamimi, who uses him as a substitute for his brother but treats him like a kid, and rejects him when he tries to ask her on a date - needs to be the adult himself.

So he grows up. "Never call me Takkun again. My name is Naota", he tells her (though only after being rejected makes the most explosive robot-penis yet come out of his head and turn into a city-destroying nightmare; because being rejected by your crush is the worst thing that can happen to you when you're a kid). Naota blatantly crushed on Haruko the whole time, but he'd just get embarrassed and mad about it when she teased him, or pretend not to care. When she turns up after going missing in episode 6, he cries for the first time, hugging her, asking where she went. Part of growing up is being honest with yourself.

Did I mention the Oedipus complex? Strictly speaking, Naota's mom isn't around (and he's even lonelier for it, poor kid), but the stand-in here is Haruko, who both Naota and his dad are obviously into. Naota resents it when Haruko gets close to his dad. Things come to a head in episode 5 when it looks like they're having sex at one point. His dad taunts Naota about it. Naota's holding a baseball bat - the symbol of Tasuku, adulthood, masculine power, and an extension of his dick (and its frustrated desires) all in one. What does he do? He smashes a TV (representing Canti, who has a TV for a head, gets kissed by Mamimi at one point - which Naota doesn't like - and is the portal for Atomsk, and thus Haruko's true goal the whole time), and a clock (representing time) flies off it and hits his dad in the head, killing him. So Naota kills his dad, the immature adult, with 1. a symbol of his penis and 2. a symbol of time over, 3. the girl they're sexually competing with each other for.

Is FLCL crass and sex-obsessed? Sure, but so are 14 year-old boys. It's not all that subtle about its symbolism and its networks of meaning - Tasuku/Tasukete is hilariously blatant - but it doesn't need to be. The anime may seem like it was written by throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, but it's a tight and coherent narrative of one kid growing up, expressed both through the haphazard and entertaining plot, and through the potent symbols that keep cropping up - baseball bats, guitars, adulthood, and young love.

And while a lot of it goes on inside Naota's head, it's by no means solipsistic. Mamimi and Ninamori each get a whole episode full of their own symbolic (and literal) narratives, which colour them in and make them equally interesting characters. We find out that Mamimi is alone, bullied, and uncared-for even as we also find out she might be an arsonist, but it's all because she misses the one person she really cared about - Tasuku - who saved her from their burning elementary school. The sequence in which Naota realises this in a furious connecting-the-dots cascade is FLCL at its best - it might be a whole minute of nothing but furiously flashing images and symbols, connecting Mamimi's lighter and cigarettes to her Firestarter video game, to the arson, to the burned elementary school, to Tasuku, to Canti, to Cantido-sama, and back.

Mamimi is very weird because she's very lonely, and avenging herself upon the town that doesn't give a shit about her using her new robot dog to eat everyone's cars isn't very satisfying even before it turns into a giant monster. Note that she calls her new pet Naota, replacing the old Takkun, whom she always treated like a pet in the first place. Mamimi's development is about making peace with Naota, not treating people selfishly because you want something from them, and embracing her own talents - as a photographer.

Ninamori doesn't get quite as neat an arc, but her little story of adolescent embarrassment and anger at her cheating dad and fear of a divorce, as well as her resentment of the secretary her dad has been cheating with, combine poignantly with her need to perform the story of the Marquis of Carabas so her parents can come watch and be happy. Revealingly, it's a story about a lie that becomes the truth - a cat, Puss in Boots, makes its owner into a nobleman by successfully pretending to be one before they switch places. And she wants Naota to play the cat; she wants him to be the one to save her.

Eventually, it works out for Ninamori's family situation. and she gets a moment in the sixth episode which beautifully illustrates FLCL's ability to depict complex, contradictory emotions. She finds Haruko and Naota asleep, together, on a bench in the street, covered by a sleeping bag and some cardboard. The older women who command Naota's affection have always inspired Ninamori's resentment, but here, she's no longer really angry or jealous. Her face reflects a complicated mixture of pity and disappointment, before she walks away, letting them be at peace.

Haruko's development is of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature, because we don't really understand her. Her enigmatic nature, by turns teasingly flirtatious and menacingly scary, is how a boy like Naota might see an intimidating older woman, only dialed up to 11 like everything else in FLCL. But it comes out like this: although she seems to have a certain fondness for Naota, everything Haruko does for him - mainly forcing him to grow up by making him swing the bat - is for her own selfish purposes, to develop his N.O. channel till it can summon Atomsk, whose power she wants to steal.

When Naota climbs out of Canti, claiming the power of Atomsk for himself and asserting his own individuality as a young man, she reveals the ferocious greed that's always been hidden by her whimsical facade, and attacks him - he could kill her, but he doesn't. He kisses her, and admits he's in love with her. And while it doesn't work out, and she does leave, she finally acknowledges that he's not just someone she can exploit and hurt for her own ends and drag around throughout space. He's still a kid. There's a fondness to her final farewell which suggests Naota managed to melt her cold heart a little.

That's FLCL; a phantasmagorical lightshow of fighting giant robots and ridiculous sexual innuendo hiding complex characterisation, strong development, some of the most credit-worthy use of "show, don't tell" as a narrative strategy, and a weirdly wonderful evocation of childhood. It's an anime that uses the near-infinite flexibility of the medium as it should be used, to tell a story in a way that nothing but an anime could.

The first time I watched Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, I turned it off ten minutes into the double-size first episode. It seemed dry and unengaging. Other anime from the same season had, in the best attention-deficit traditions, included some big dramatic hook or reveal early in their opening episode to grab the viewer. Set against them, Rakugo felt tedious. But I dropped almost every other anime from that season, and I picked this one back up, finishing it in two days.

What I realised was that Rakugo is unique among anime, in that it's a novel. Its strengths lie in the naturalistic rendering of human ... behaviour and situations as well as the detailed evocation of a historical period. It draws you in by slowly revealing fascinating, damaged characters locked in a poisonous stalemate: Konatsu, an orphaned girl who loves rakugo and could never perform it, and the foremost rakugo artist of his time, the former rival of the girl's father - Yurakutei Yakumo, who I will call Kikuhiko. Konatsu hates Kikuhiko enough to want to kill him, but lives in his house; he treats her with indifference and condescension, sometimes shading into irritation, but he never throws her out. Why? What debt does he owe her, and why does she hate him so much? How did her father die?

Animes tend to be driven by very different questions, which are forward-looking. Usually, the protagonists are either striving to fulfill their dreams or trying to deal with a situation which provides the impetus for the plot. Rakugo is unique, and more like a novel than almost any anime, because it's about the past, and about how the combination of your circumstances, your personality, your desires, the people you meet, and the society you live in, shape your life. Which is an excellent thing to be about when the subject of your questions is Kikuhiko.

A diffident, strait-laced neurotic with a deep loneliness at his centre as well as a bitter determination to not give up and be abandoned again, Kikuhiko is one of the all-time great anime protagonists. He is deeply flawed and often cruel, but an innate idealism and a wounded innocence at his heart keeps him sympathetic. His psychological development is profoundly well-realised. Kikuhiko's foil, Sukeroku, is jolly and uninhibited, a supremely talented rakugoka who has a gift for drawing people to him and making them laugh. It would be predictable for Kikuhiko to simply hate him, and for them to be contrasted as dark and light, but Rakugo is far more intelligent about its characters than that. They may contrast, but they also inform each other. Sukeroku's lack of inhibition leads him to debauchery and a disregard for proper conduct which comes to hurt his career even as Kikuhiko overcomes his lack of talent with obsessive study to develop his own style of art, and his rigid decorum makes him the preferred child of the rakugo establishment. But they don't become enemies; they like each other too much.

The strange relationship between Kikuhiko and Sukeroku, with love and mutual artistic appreciation and jealousy and resentment all tied up in it, is at the core of the anime: their introvert/extrovert opposition shades into its depiction of the paradoxes in the art of rakugo - a totally solitary performance which requires a rakugoka to know and truly understand people, and be able to impersonate many at once, to succeed. It is steeped in tradition, and rakugokas must conform to strictly conservative standards of behaviour, as if they represent the old values of Japan. But at the same time, rakugokas are working stiffs with an especially precarious occupation, and socially speaking, just lowly entertainers. Kikuhiko cannot be in a relationship with a geisha if he wants to advance in rakugo, but the stories he tells are often bawdy; overt sexuality is in fact his specialty, despite his personal frigidity. Sukeroku's enthusiastic caricatures are at first depicted as the gold standard, but they lack the subtlety of Kikuhiko's art; it's to the anime's credit that you begin to notice and appreciate rakugo enough to realise how their art reflects who they are. The fine layering of detail combined with the naturalistic development of the characters, all scored spectacularly by a traditional shamisen-and-taiko-drums soundtrack, makes Rakugo as satisfying on a sensory level as it is intellectually fascinating.

These contradictions and the way the protagonists navigate them while being inevitably changed in the process, give a deep thematic richness to Rakugo, which uses the rise and fall of Sukeroku and Kikuhiko both as a way to examine artistic obsession, jealousy, love, and brotherhood, and as a way to depict the cultural shifts in Japan after World War Two. Here, its insights are not as sharp; it's more a character piece than social commentary, but the thirty-year canvas on which the story is painted allows for a sense of epic scope to the stories of the characters. Much like rakugo itself, the anime combines acute observation of humanity with a slightly artificial shape to its narrative. Its tragic end, where Kikuhiko and Sukeroku's selfish mistakes result, with karmic symmetry, in two always-expected and yet shocking deaths, feels more melodramatic than naturalistic, and yet it is brutally sad and horrifying. This anime can make what should seem false and contrived into something that hits you on a visceral level, and that's appropriate: it's what rakugo's all about.

There are two standards against which it's fair to measure Psycho-Pass.

One is the standard of the genre piece - it's a very Western show, a police procedural in a sci-fi setting partly lifted from the film Minority Report, with familiar UK/US TV hallmarks like serial killers linked behind the scenes to a mastermind who facilitates their crimes (see: Sherlock, Hannibal), brooding and obsessive detectives who are in danger of getting "in too deep", terrorists who want to make statements against society, etc. How exciting is it? How visceral is the action? How complex and/or surprising is the plotting?

The other is the standard of ... the show it often wants to be, full of references to Pascal, Weber, Foucault, Plato, and Descartes, and concerned with the profound social implications of an AI-ruled society. At various times, Psycho-Pass delves into the psychological impact of constant emotional repression in a situation where everyone who exhibits any stress is immediately shunted into therapy, the implications for safety and security on a total dependence on the Sybil AI's infallibility (taken to the extent that people don't lock their doors), and the ethics of its central premise - that people deserve to be imprisoned and isolated before they do anything wrong because an AI decided they might be dangerous. Psycho-Pass wants to say something meaningful about who we are and how we'll change as technology changes the way we live.

On the first standard, Psycho-Pass is largely a success. While the action is rarely innovative or as exciting as other series with a similar tone like Darker than Black, the moody cyberpunk setting and the strong characterisation of the lead trio - Akane, Shinya, and Gino - make up for it. The main strength, aside from its characters, is its confident approach to crime stories involving the detection of serial killers through analysing their crimes and hunting them with the tools available to the police - the obvious intelligence in Akane and Shinya's approach to police work elevate the procedural elements of the show above the average anime mystery show, although the mysteries are little better than mediocre in comparison to their obvious Western influences.

But when it tries to go beyond a well-done sci-fi detective series, it stumbles more often than it succeeds. While several major storylines, focusing on the subversion of the Sybil system or the way freedom from consequence can turn law-abiding citizens into violent criminals, demonstrate a superficially accurate understanding of human nature, Psycho-Pass rarely manages to offer any deeper or more specific insights into how people might change in response to such technology. Its ethical conflicts, specifically regarding the morality of locking people up because a scan said they were latent criminals, are rarely investigated beyond the simple answer of "We've got to live with it, because it mostly works."

A genuinely well-constructed sci-fi premise can give the viewer historical context which explains how human society evolved until reaching the present situation - who exactly introduced the Sybil system to begin with, or how Japan moved from a free-trading internationally-open state into an isolationist enclave ruled by an AI with no pretense of democratic government, or how exactly the first generation of Japanese - used to the freedom of choice in their professions and their lives - reacted when the Sybil system began controlling what jobs they were allowed to do and pushing therapy on them if their emotional state seemed fragile.

There's a huge gap between society right now, and the society in Psycho-Pass, and the show makes almost no attempt to explain what pushed people across the gap. Was democratic self-government with the rule of law, being judged by a jury of your peers, and the promise of being innocent until proven guilty, really such a failure that people were willing to risk being locked up for doing nothing wrong by an AI over which they had no control? Was there a war, or some massive political failure, or a revolution? What happened? While some inferences can be made - the USSR or China provide a handy examples of a society where people eventually acquiesced to having their lives centrally controlled and monitored - there's a troubling lack of explanation for why people would accept any of this when it was first introduced.

This central problem of implausibility becomes magnified to the point that it actively hurts the show during the final reveal in the last six-episode arc, of how the Sybil system is run, and by whom, and how it maintains itself. Almost all the revelations which come out of this final arc are pure, unadulterated nonsense, which make it genuinely baffling that society could have ever accepted the Sybil system in the first place. They can't be discussed without spoiling potential viewers, but they set a hard limit on how favourably Psycho-Pass can be judged. As a genre piece, in the context of anime, it's reliably decent and sometimes good, but as anything more than conventional entertainment, it's at best a brave failure.

Two things set Hirunaka no Ryuusei apart from other conventional shojo mangas.

One is the art: it's clean, very well-formed, with appealing character designs and an unusual amount of variation in facial features and hairstyles which helps distinguish the cast - most shojo mangas can't do as well.

The second, and by far the more important, is that the characters show a great deal of maturity and introspection in resolving their feelings and trying to act in a way that's true to themselves without hurting others. They don't always succeed, and neither does this straightforwardness and maturity stop Hirunaka from going down a fairly predictable path ... of love triangles and will-they/won't-they. But because the characters aren't irrational, contrived, or stupid, you can understand why they make the choices they make, invest in them emotionally and genuinely care about their happiness.

Ryuusei is limited and deeply flawed due to its singular focus on a love triangle as well as its near-total lack of a larger plot. With one exception, the supporting characters aren't quite strong enough to keep the manga afloat if the focus moves off the central love triangle, so there's little scope for suggesting a life outside of the endless (and wearying) heart-pounding drama of who to fall in love with. Nevertheless, although it adds up to less than the sum of its parts and doesn't use its lively and emotionally convincing characters as well as it could, it's still solidly above average.