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While being a sports anime through and through, Blue Lock focuses on individuals within a team sports. Quite an original stance as one would expect a soccer anime to be about teamwork and human relationships. I was personally extremely deterred by this aspect within the first episode, I was expecting a team sport anime with a lighter touch and was disappointed to see this being a kind of battle royale to elect one "best striker" within all.

The battle royale style is extremely efficient as is shrinkens the setting in a behind closed doors environement, allowing you to focus only on a few characters without ... having to deal with a heavy context and laying out very clear rules for the audience, and for the scriptwriters to play with, but it is also a totally worn out style of writing and has been overused since Squid Game (and much before) so that the audience is generally weary of its mechanics and will be hard to surprise.

I was absolutely unsurprised by the results of each game past the first 3 episodes. I feel the more it goes, the less surprised you get with the show. You quickly get tired with the shonen style evolution of each characters and since the evolution of each of them tends to something more egoistic, there is nothing innovative that can come from new bonds and connexions being made in the story. Each of them tend to go deeper into themselves and less turned outwards.

I'm quite intrigued to see what the 2nd season will bring as the show seems to have exhausted all its inital potential already...

However, Blue lock is still very well paced, the character designs and the animation are pretty good and fit its genre.

Have you ever fantasized about a very dark and thrilling, intelligent yet entertaining show that would make you see your world and everyday life differently ?
That is exactly what Yakusoku no Neverland tries to be. That is also what it fails to be.

The beginning of the show is indeed thrilling, the first twist brings this somehow Slice of Life looking series into a Horror one, with all the might of the "paradigm shift"... In terms of scriptwriting It's very well mimicking series the likes of "Shingeki no Kyojin" or "WestWorld", slowly establishing/revealing the rules of the game to the spectator, keeping a lot of things ... uncertain so that the audience keeps watching to know the whole truth behind this, but also because it's such a useful tool as a scriptwriter: you can make your rules as the game is playing.

But as a spectator some people tend to find this annoying, and I'm part of these people who would like to feel that they have the same card in hands that the creators, instead of being carried from a twist to another like a hand ball. This is the main irritating aspect of this show, the pattern is always the same: nothing goes as expected, and again, and again, as a kind of spiral stairway of twists upon twists, but by the tenth episode the surprise is long gone and you find yourself yawning at how "mommy" had expected that the children had expected that she had expected that they'd expect she'd know that... (no spoilers ;) )

Except for this overuse of backwards-logic writing, The show is very well delivered, the animation is pretty smooth, with a strong but interesting style, and some really impressive image quality for a weekly-based show. The film-making is globally common, with intense dramatic scenes and strong use of background music, but sometimes tries to go further and actually finds some original and strong ideas with the use of silence or camera movements.

Fune wo Amu was a pretty unexpected experience for me as a casual anime viewer, it goes quite far into cultural aspects and beautifully uses the extent of Japanese language to treat its subject.

It starts as a pretty common slice of life genre, and develops beautifully into this, with some poetry and very little exaggerations in terms of drama or climax scenes.

The subject of dictionary-making is seemingly extremely boring but the series surprises in that it really makes you interested in what a dictionary actually is, and makes you look at it differently. Being curious of Japanese I admired the complexity and play of ... words that are used throughout the show, within or without the context of dictionary-making, knitting in its content the beauty and ambiguity of this language.

One of the great aspects of this show is also the very subtle and intelligent use of sound, creating very efficient atmospheres but also to develop the story with a lot of off-camera sounds to catch your attention or broaden your experience of this small universe.

I totally recommend it if you're into Japanese language or cultural aspects, or even just if you want a good and peaceful time within a world where nothing can be done quickly ;)