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Seeing Hibike Euphonium finally come to a close after all these years leaves me with a bittersweet feeling. After watching the first and second seasons about 6 years ago and absolutely falling in love with them, I somehow managed to miss the release of any of the movies or OVAs. But that meant in the back of my mind I knew there was always more; that I could always revisit these characters and continue their journey. When I saw season 3 was airing, I knew it was time to finally catch up on the backlog of released content and then see this thing through to ... its conclusion. And after finally closing this chapter of my anime experience, I can say that bittersweet feeling is just as much a reaction to the series ending as it is to the quality of this season itself.

It should be obvious to anyone with an eye for this sort of thing, but the writing and directing of this show fell off quite a bit after the departure of Naoko Yamada. The first season felt like one of her masterpieces—you could feel her style oozing out of every frame. Folks familiar with the auteur know that she’s the queen of legs—Medium wrote an entire article entitled “Naoko Yamada: Legs as a Language.” Quoting her at the beginning of the article, “The eyes may be the window to the soul, but I think our legs are like that too. Usually, we hide our legs under our desks or else they’ll reveal our true emotions.”

Re-watch the first season of Hibike Euphonium and you’ll notice shots of girls’ legs everywhere, and the composition of those shots is so perfect that you can easily identify which character belongs to which set of legs just from their positioning and motion on screen. Re-watch season 3, and there are no legs in sight.

Is this a petty thing to care about? Of course it is. But it’s illustrative of just how much the first season of Hibike Euphonium was HER show. You can tell it in all the ways that are more important than legs. Take the writing, for example. I’ve said this in several of my reviews, but my definition of “great art” is something that asks the question, “What does it mean to be human?” in a new or interesting way. In other words, great art is ABOUT something, it has something to say. The first season of Hibike Euphonium was about a listless directionless teenager finding passion and focus with the help of a passionate muse, and what it takes to motivate a large group of similarly floundering people behind a common goal. By the end of the first season, this question had been largely answered, and even though Kitauji High hadn’t won gold, it didn’t matter. Because that’s not really what the show was about anyway.

But because the show made money and the novel had more gas left in the tank, the series continued. Yamada is credited on the second season, but her influence feels far diminished. Instead of the tight writing of the first season, where the seeds of all the drama that would unfold were planted up front and created conflict in a way that felt organic throughout the show, in season 2 everything feels like defined arcs. We start the show with problem A, we deal with problem A, and wouldn’t ya know, conveniently just when we’ve got problem A all squared away, here comes problem B and start of the next arc. Real life doesn’t work like that, problems happen concurrently and interact with each other and it’s complicated. Season 1 knew that, season 2 forgot that.

I still loved season 2 because I had enough goodwill built up with the show from season 1. These were still the characters we knew and loved, and even though the main themes were basically over after the first season, we wanted to see our characters get to the Nationals and compete, so it felt kind of like a victory lap for the show. But then we ran into the next problem: the third years had to graduate. With this came a new batch of characters for the movies and OVAs, and they don’t hold a candle to the ones we started with.

Enter season 3. Naoko Yamada is now nowhere to be seen in the credits. We have the same problem of "arc-y" storytelling season 2 had, and now we have this new crop of characters. Thankfully the characterization of Kumiko, Reina, and the rest of the season 1 first-year gang never got flanderized or messed with too bad, but the new first-years… man, Ayano Takeda really ran out of ideas around here didn’t she? Yayoi, Suzume, Mirei, Motomu, all of them feel like nothing-burgers compared to the original cast. The only new character worth the screen time they got was Kanade, who I think was actually a really good addition to the show. She added a fresh element, a sort of snake-like foil to our terminally good-girl Kumiko. But the rest of these people… I mean, Motomu’s entire arc this season consisted of “Oh, he’s sad.” “Oh, actually he’s not sad.” Arc over. Like, what even is this?

This brings me to the new character who gets the most screen time: Mayu Kuroe. Again, I have the same problem with her as I do with the other new characters: she’s nothing. She’s a blank slate. She’s a tabula rasa. She has no memorable personality traits whatsoever, she only exists to cause bring conflict to Kumiko. But, what conflict does she bring, exactly? The point of her joining the club is to cause narrative conflict between Kumiko and Reina vis-à-vis Mayu being better at the euphonium than Kumiko is. But, we already had this same conflict in the third movie, Chikai no Finale. In fact, we retread the exact same story beats, where in that movie Kanade wanted to throw her audition for Natsuki’s sake, and in this season Mayu wants to do the exact same thing for Kumiko for the exact same reason. I guess the stakes are slightly different because there’s a soli on the line, but man… we needed something better. This show deserved something better.

Speaking of things we deserved from this show: actual musical performances. In its rush to say a lot of nothing in 13 episodes, we neglect any of the musical performances that have made this show so special. The oboe performance at the end of Liz and the Blue Bird was so incredibly effective at explaining to us without words exactly the emotional state of both characters of Nozomi and Mizure. And yet, in this season where we have a similar structure in regards to the soli, we barely hear any performances. Even when it’s time for the penultimate performance at the regionals—after Kumiko's big dramatic speech—we cut to credits. Boo.

So, at the end of the day, is this a bad show? No. It’s merely an average show. But that’s a far fall from grace when season 1 was one of the best things ever animated. Should you watch it? If you’ve come this far in the Hibike Euphonium saga, then yes. It’s nice to see characters get closure, it’s nice to see a certain famous scene in the first season mirrored in an effective way, and it’s nice to see Kumiko finally grow to adulthood and see what choice she made with her life. But nothing will ever beat that incredible artful first season and Naoko Yamada’s signature touch.

Thank you for reading.

What a disaster of a remake.

I’m going to keep this briefer than my usual reviews because I had no plan on reviewing this when I started watching it, so I didn’t take any notes and I’m certainly not rewatching any of it to articulate my thoughts. To understand what makes this such a failure of an adaptation, you have to understand what worked about the original Kino’s Journey.

First, the original had a true visionary behind it—that of Ryuutarou Nakamura. For those unaware, this is the same guy who directed Serial Experiments Lain; it’s clear Nakamura has a penchant for highbrow philosophical experimentalism in his work. ... Compared to Lain, Kino is approachable and down-to-Earth, but in a way that still leaves you with food for thought. By the end of the OG show’s run, we still didn’t really know much about Kino, Hermes, or any of the other characters we were introduced to—and that’s fine, because for what that show was trying to be, it didn’t matter. Kino’s Journey wasn’t a show about the characters, the characters were just a vessel for the viewers to see the world and be fed ideas to think about.

Those ideas took the format of an episodic morality play. Each episode, Kino would travel to a new “country” which had its own laws or customs which would challenge the viewer’s perception of right and wrong. The stories were often told in the same way as fables, where the logic of those “countries” doesn’t make a whole ton of sense when you really stop and think about it—but that’s the thing: like with a good fable, you’re not supposed to think about details of how a society would practically function with such ridiculous rules. The scenarios aren’t supposed to be taken absolutely literally. Each country functions as more of a thought experiment into concepts like the futility of menial work and the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies.

This is the first way the remake falls flat. It largely eschews the heady themes and format of the original show and instead focuses on world-building and character development… and it sucks. For instance, we spend an entire episode developing the backstory of a character named Photo who it seems like they intend on becoming a recurring character, but we see them exactly one time and that’s it. And it’s a god-awful episode. We also spend a lot more time with Shizu, but it’s mostly to develop this new character Tii who is a completely uninteresting silent-loli. And the episode she’s introduced in is a god-awful episode. They try to build Kino’s characterization up by making her a badass action hero which feels both out of character and dumb. And the last episode of the show where they try to really lock that image of her in is a god-awful episode.

Not only is the new material bad, but they managed to fumble the parts of the original show they remade as well. They condensed Colosseum down from a two-parter to a single episode and lost a lot of its nuance in the process. And then they aired the episode Kind Country before A Country of Adults. Viewers of the original show will know that A Country of Adults sets up the events of Kind Country in a way that satisfyingly pays off. The remake airs them in reverse order for absolutely no reason and it totally ruins the foreshadowing and callbacks of that pair of episodes.

I’m honestly baffled as to how this happened. I get that Nakamura wasn’t involved, so the style of the show understandably sucks. But it’s still the same source material, so how could the quality of the writing fall off so hard? I’ve never read the light novel these shows are based off of, so I can only assume Nakamura adapted the chapters that fit his vision—which were the good chapters—and left only scraps for the remake to pick up. Whatever the cause was, the end result is that the original was interesting and thought-provoking, whereas the remake loses all the intrigue of the original by wasting time developing characters and a world in a way that raises none of those same interesting questions about what it means to be human.

The second thing that makes this remake miserable is the art style. I won’t harp on this too much since the original wasn’t exactly a feast for the eyes either—Kino’s Journey is about the ideas not the visuals. And yet, watching CGI sheep bounce off a CGI car driven by CGI Kino in the final episode just made me absolutely howl laughing, which is not a great note to end your show on.

I’m almost at 800 words for this review, but the TL;DR is this: skip this show and watch the original. Everything they remade from the original is worse here, and nothing new is worth your time.

Thank you for reading.

Oro? Oro oro??

Ruroni Kenshin… a beloved classic produced the year I was born. I decided to pick this up mainly because of how good I’ve heard Trust and Betrayal is, but after finishing the series proper I had to write a full review because it would do this show a disservice to just slap a number on it and move on. I’ll try and keep this one brief. I’ll probably fail.

This is a show I want to be able to say I love, because there’s a lot here to love. Kenshin is one of the gems in director Kazuhiro Furuhashi’s Infinity Gauntlet, next to Hunter ... x Hunter, Gundam Unicorn, and Spy x Family. This is a director who needs no introduction—his work across 40 years of anime speaks for itself. His blood runs shounen, and he’s made a name for himself because almost everything he touches is quality. And directorially, Kenshin lives up to the hype. Despite having to get by on a 90s budget and make it stretch for almost a hundred episodes, Kenshin has a certain energy to it. Action scenes are never sakuga-infused eye candy, but the cuts, angles, and sense of kinetic energy keeps it exciting to watch. But… what are we even watching?

This is where I’m going to have to show my hand a little and explain that I do not typically enjoy shounen anime. Like, at all. The tropes that everyone loves… shouting attack names, speeches in the middle of battles, the-former-enemy-is-now-your-friend, all that stuff just really doesn’t resonate with me. I’m a big salty bald adult man now, not a teenager; I’m decidedly not the target demographic for these kinds of shows. I prefer a bit more subtlety and maturity in what I watch. However, when I decide to spend my time doing anything I like to put my best foot forward, so let me get into some of the things that kept me watching through the entire lengthy series.

First of all, there’s the setting. I’m a huge history nerd, and an even bigger Japanese history nerd. And my favorite period of Japanese history is definitely the Meiji Restoration. This show doesn’t just take place during the Meiji period—it embraces it with reckless abandon. Actual historical characters appear left and right—we’re talking people like Yamagata Aritomo, Saitou Hajime, and Katsu Kaishu—and most of them play large roles in the plot. The entire central theme of the show revolves around Japan’s transition from a warring feudal system to a modern peaceful nation-state and the philosophical predicament that places on the people who must use force to enforce that peace. Heavier stuff than your average shounen.

That brings me to the second strength of this show: the man who used more force than anyone to achieve his goals, Himura Kenshin. Among shounen protagonists, Kenshin stands apart for several reasons. For one, he’s 28 years old—much older than what we typically see in these kinds of shows. That age lends credence to his dark past because he’s had enough time alive to actually… you know… HAVE a dark past. And second is his ideals. While every other shounen protagonist’s ideals can be easily boiled down into something you can shout at the baddie in the series finale, Kenshin has a little more complexity to him. He combines optimistic pacifism with pragmatism.

Early on in the series Okubo Toshimichi approaches him and asks him to become part of the new Meiji government and Kenshin declines, which is surprising to Okubo because Kenshin fought so hard to put that government into place. But what Kenshin knows is that to keep that government in place, he’ll have to continue to perpetuate a cycle of violence that he doesn’t agree with. This is basically Max Weber’s philosophical treatise “Politics as a Vocation” presented in an anime for young teens: the fundamental characteristic of any government is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Kenshin both understands that fact and disagrees with it. After all, even if he fought to establish the Meiji government because he felt it was a better alternative to the Tokugawa shogunate, would everything they ask Kenshin to do be justifiable? He knows the answer to that is no, so he chooses a different path: rather than blindly do the bidding of some dubiously moral entity, he just tries to help the people who are directly in front of him who are obviously hurting or in danger, because that use of force requires the least possible amount of mental gymnastics to justify.

This is where my opinion on this show begins to fundamentally differ from most other people’s. Everyone else I see talk about this show unanimously agrees that everything before and after the Kyoto arc is boring filler, and the Kyoto arc is the real 10/10 stuff in this show. I have the complete opposite opinion: I think the “filler” is the best part, and the Kyoto arc is boring as sin. Those slow episodic “slice-of-life” -ish bits are where the show really takes its time to establish characterization and explore the show’s themes and setting. The Kyoto arc is where the show slides right back into all those same tired cliché shounen tropes that I mentioned hating a few paragraphs ago. By the time the Shishio battle was nearing its conclusion the show had become an absolute slog for me; I contemplated dropping it a few times but was barely able to finish it.

Is this the show’s fault? Not really—it just wasn’t written for me. I touched on this briefly in my last review of Kemono no Souja Erin, but I’m not the target audience for shows written at the YA level. And if you’ve read my review up to this point but haven’t seen the show, don’t let my over-analysis fool you—this show really doesn’t explore those interesting concepts it presents very deeply. I guess that’s the most frustrating part of this whole experience for me: the show teases my brain with these interesting themes and characters, and then barely scratches the surface with them because we can’t go too deep since we’re a shounen and need our battle arcs gosh darnit.

Overall, I’m going to have to give the show a 6—which on my rating scale is still a recommendation, albeit a weak one. If I were 13 years old again, this might be one of my favorite shows. If you’re a shounen fan, you should definitely check this one out. As it stands though, this is a battle shounen first and foremost, and an interesting historical thinker a distant second.

Oh, and Misao best girl don’t @ me.

I watched this show with absolutely no intent of writing a review on it. Those of you who know the meta of MAL reviews know that writing a review of a relatively unknown show from over 10 years ago is a great way to make sure nobody reads it. But as Kemono no Souja Erin unfolded over its 50-episode journey, my thoughts on it were too scattered and my feelings too complex to boil down into a simple number or even a short note under the entry on my list page. This is an anime that deserves attention and discussion; even if no one reads ... this review, I need to write it for my own sake.

First, some backstory on how I stumbled upon this show. A long time ago on 4chan there was a daring individual who decided to compile a list of the “best-written” anime from the /a/ board and then post it on /lit/ hoping to draw comments from literature nerds. Those of you who know /lit/ can probably guess how well that went, but this list intrigued me—not for the shows on it I had already seen (which were most of them) but for the ones on it I hadn’t seen yet. While working my way through that list, I made it down to one of them that was a little show called Kemono no Souja Erin. Do I agree with that ancient OP that Erin is one of the best written shows of all time? Stay tuned till the end of this review to find out, because the discussion below is going to determine our final analysis.

To understand any show I always first look to the creative forces behind it, in this case director Takayuki Hamana. Takayuki is a tough nut to crack as there’s not a whole lot of information about him online. He’s only done one interview which I could find, and that interview predated Erin by a few years (and I even had to dig through Production I.G.’s website on the Wayback Machine to find that one). From what little information I have been able to gather, he seems like an industry veteran—he got his start as a key animator and worked on anime as classic as Ranma 1/2, before moving to Production I.G. and working on some of the greats like Jin-Roh and Psycho-Pass. His journey as a director, however, has been a little less… how can I put it… impressive? Scrolling through his directorial works doesn’t really reveal anything I’d consider above average. Most surprising to me was that he was the director of the criminally boring Arte—a show which I dropped while it was airing way back in 2020. This career history of his might explain some of the directorial issues I have with Erin, which we’ll get into later.

One creative force I absolutely can give props to is the music director Masayuki Sakamoto. The OST for this show is one of its strongest points. The OP and EDs along with every insert song are incredibly catchy instant earworms. I dare you to not find yourself singing along to “Lalalila” or feel like a snake being charmed by “Ai.” I’ve seen some people complain about the OST starting to feel repetitive by the end of the show, but honestly—it’s a 50 episode run, you’re going to be tired of any show’s music by the end of that many episodes. Better for it to be an OST this good than some generic fantasy isekai score. This show is a great example of how good music can elevate any media; would Star Wars or Jurassic Park be even half as good without those classic John Williams scores?

Before we tackle the story itself, I want to talk about some of my technical issues with this show, which partially involves us going back to Takayuki Hamana again. Anyone who watches this show will instantly recognize two things: A) this show seems like it had a low budget and B) this show does NOT look like it was animated by Production I.G. I have no way of confirming whether the first one is true or not, but I can definitely say that Production I.G.’s inclusion as a contributing studio is just for clout—most of the animation on this was done by Trans Arts (of which Hamana was affiliated at the time of creation). They made the wise decision of going for a simpler art style which worked out in the long-term for the show. But neither their animators nor their budget could keep up with even that simple art style during high-motion action scenes. For any scene with even a modicum of motion, we get quick cuts, cutaways, and reused footage in a desperate attempt to preserve the animators from having to actually draw much movement. Hamana has a tendency of cutting from one angle of something happening to another angle that’s only slightly different, resulting in a weird jumpy effect that doesn’t show any new information to the viewer, it just poorly disguises the stiff art. In normal dialogue scenes we basically only get shot-counter-shot with uninspired blocking and business. Meh.

But art and direction aren’t the main selling points of this show—at least, they weren’t to me way back when I first saw this show on that list of best written anime. For that, we need to look to the show’s source material, an old book by Nahoko Uehashi of the same name. I’ve never read it as it seems to be virtually impossible to find it in English, but from everything I’ve seen online bi-lingual folks claim the anime adapts the first two volumes faithfully, aside from adding two anime-original characters in the form of our comic relief Nukku and Mokku (who, by the way, I didn’t mind nearly as much as everyone else seems to). And man, the story of this show is where its strengths start to shine.

Watching this show, it just FELT like a classic. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then it came to me—World Masterpiece Theater. If you’re not familiar with what that is, they’re anime adaptations of famous Western works of fiction, notably books like Anne of Green Gables and Heidi of the Alps. When I think of what makes books like that (and others like David Copperfield) classics, it’s that you follow the main character for so long and through so many stages of their life that you really feel like you know them. You stay with them through their young childhood, see them grow through young adulthood into full-fledged adulthood, and by the time they’re making adult decisions you truly understand all their motivations because you know them as well as you’d know an old friend. That’s exactly how Erin feels: it absolutely nails the feeling of the passing of time. I see a lot of people complain about the 50 episode runtime and say it should have been cut drastically down, but I disagree. We need to spend lazy days with toddler Erin, because in doing so we feel the weight of her adult decisions because we’ve seen her formative years. Once I got into the groove of seeing Erin at a particular stage in her life, something in the show would pop up that would make me look back and get me emotional with the weight of how far we’d come.

Unfortunately, with that type of story there do come some drawbacks. Within those 50 episodes are several recap episodes and many, many, MANY flashbacks. For younger audiences I think that would be important, especially when watching weekly. But this brings me to a larger problem limiting my enjoyment of this show: its target audience. It is very clear that the original novel was intended for a YA crowd, and leaning much more heavily to the Y than the A. The political drama that unfolds in the background is very simplistic and leaves several pretty glaring questions unanswered by the end of the show. The scheming and plotting of the main villain, which is built up by being kept in the shadows for most of the show, is revealed at the end to be straightforward simple stuff. Basically, don’t go into this show expecting to be blown away by complex political intrigue and interpersonal relationships. If I was 13-ish when I found this show it might be my favorite show. But I’m currently an ancient fossil, and while I do try to keep an open mind to experience art meant for people other than myself, it wasn’t exactly “scintillating.”

Another weakness of this show is that it starts to fall apart towards its final act. The result of spending most of our time with Erin and very little on the actual plot means that the ending is rushed, unsatisfying, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. This feels inexcusable when we have the equivalent of several entire episodes worth of flashbacks, recaps, and summaries. The story needed to refocus its attention and better utilize its time.

Going back to a positive note, I’ve always held to the idea that great art can be defined as anything that asks the question, “What does it mean to be human?” in a new or interesting way. If you asked, “What does it mean to be curious?” you might get Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you asked, “What does it mean to be alone?” you might get Evangelion. I think Erin asks the question, “What does it mean to have strong ideals challenged?” That, in my opinion, is the core of the show. Erin is a character with ideals. Because of the amount of time we spend with her through her life, we fully understand and respect her ideals. But the world she lives in is not going to let her ideals go unchallenged. The way she navigates the sticky ethical quandaries her circumstances put her in, the way she doesn’t always make the right choice, and the impact those choices have on the humans and beasts around her that she loves—that is the real heart and soul of this show and it works in spades.

So now I’m three pages deep in this Word document and I have to figure out how to actually end this thing. All in all, I’m going to give this show an 8/10, although it’s a complicated 8. As I’ve hopefully made clear by now, this is not a perfect show. It has amateurish direction, simplistic art, ugly CGI, tons of flashback and recaps, and an unsatisfactory conclusion (although YMMV on that part). However, what it does have is heart and a message. It feels like a classic. It takes its time to develop a character beyond what the average anime is willing to commit to, which results in it feeling like one of the great classic works of literature. So, to the random anonymous person who posted that list of best written anime years and years ago: if you’re out there somewhere reading this, you were right. Rock on Erin.

To what extent does one’s expectations dictate their final opinion of a show? This is a question I’ve grappled with on and off lately, and it’s something that I think I finally have to come to terms with in this review. Because, you see, many of my favorite things became favorites because they surprised me with their quality. And man, I could not have gone into this show with lower expectations. At the time of writing, Bocchi the Rock! is sitting at an 8-point-whatever on MAL, which to me means absolutely nothing and is actually usually a bad sign. And yet, here I am, loving ... this show despite my better judgment.

For the approximately 2 people who follow my reviews, you’ll notice this is the second time in a row I’ve reviewed a show that should by all rights have been seasonal schlock and been surprised at the quality of what I found. I will admit that as a reviewer, I have a problem. I find it much easier to articulate reasons that I don’t like something, than reasons why I do like something. When I like something, I tend to say “it was good” and leave it at that, whereas when something sucks I can write an almighty thesis on why. Yofukashi no Uta and this show have both brought me out of that shell, but I think it’s partly because these shows highlight to such a degree why OTHER shows in the same vein suck so hard.

Enter Bocci the Rock. Do you want to watch a show where an introverted NEET has awkward social interactions for us to laugh at in fits of schadenfreude? Take your friggin’ pick; there are about 19 billion of these things. One of the first pieces of advice anyone breaking into the creative fields gets is to write what you know. Apparently every mangaka ever was an introvert and social outcast, which makes me wonder about the mental health of the manga industry as a whole, but that’s a different topic. This is a formula that has been done to DEATH, and I mean it. Probably more than literally any other premise, possibly with the exception of being hit by a truck and reincarnated in another world. The problem is that once you reach the point of supersaturation, any new entries in the genre will be pitted against the greats. In the category of relatable social awkwardness we have amazing shows like Watamote, and in the category of band or music shows we have K-On, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso, etc. My gut told me this was going to be less K-On and more Carole & Tuesday (i.e. dogcrap).

And let’s be clear about something: is this a modern classic on par with the aforementioned? Probably not. Let’s start with the negatives about the production. First, the animation can be rough. This is a CloverWorks gig, and CloverWorks is giving A1 a run for their money as far as how hard they can overwork their animators. A lot of the linework in this show is sketch-book quality, like they took the douga sheets and just digitally colored them. Characters are more frequently off-model than they are on-model. Backgrounds are obviously photographs with a photoshop filter stuck over them and the characters crudely superimposed with no effort to blend them into the backgrounds whatsoever. However, the show makes the best with what it’s got and gets creative with its limited resources. There are several insert scenes that use real-life footage, stop-motion clay models, and CGI; sometimes these scenes dip so far into surrealism that I was laughing at the guts Keiichirou Saitou had to commit to the joke. The scenes where all the band members are on-stage performing also incorporate CGI really well (compare with early episodes of Zombieland Saga to see examples of on-stage-performance CGI being blended poorly).

The story is where this show really starts to separate itself from its middling counterparts. First off, Bocci is established as actually being GOOD at something. This is incredibly rare in this kind of show and is part of the reason I generally find shows like this so tiring. Just look at this show’s conceptual cousin, Hitoribocchi, where the main character has all the same flaws (and dang near the same name), but is good at nothing. I’m not saying your lovable doofus main character MUST have a secret talent, but man does it help a show stand out in this sea of mediocre shows about mediocre people.

Bocchi’s dilemma also happened to be specifically relatable to me. As a shut-in, she takes up guitar and becomes good at it. But when she tries to play with others in a band, she finds that playing with other people takes a completely different skillset and she initially bombs. As someone who plays guitar and has for over 15 years–with the majority of that time being by myself–I have the exact same struggle any time anyone asks me if I want to play with them. Take away my laptop and my DAW and you would watch me stumble and fall behind the beat and wonder if I had ever picked up the instrument before. The fact that she’s as successful as she is online brings up an interesting thought: the Internet is allowing a generation of people who before might have never had a chance to show their talents, to shine. But the downside to being “extremely online” is that the real world still exists, and once those worlds collide you find out the skills you developed in the one don’t translate to the other.

This show really nails the little details, too. My favorite one is that perennially drunk bassist Hiroi Kikuri’s phone screen is cracked in every scene you can see it in. It’s a little touch, but it adds some characterization where a lesser show would be lacking. We also get a ton of full-length songs–sometimes several per episode–and they’re (subjectively) really good. And I gotta say, Bocchi’s impromptu slide-guitar performance (which was set up beautifully with Hiroi’s offhand comment about the glass sake bottles) made me audibly “Ayy!” at the screen. This show also has the honor of being the second anime ever to make me fully belly-laugh, with the gag in the final episode where Nijika is playing the drums using the guitars.

So where does all this leave my opinion on the show? Well, I’m going to score it an 8, but if MAL’s rating system were a little more granular I’d probably give it a 7.5–and for those of you new to my reviews, that’s still a very good score from me. I don’t think it quite reaches the levels of a true timeless masterpiece like K-On. That show had substance, subtext, and directorial style that is unmatched to this day. But in a world where BanG Dream is about the level of quality you can expect from any random seasonal band show, Bocchi the Rock stole my cynical heart. Rock on, Bocchi!

I actually liked this show.

Sorry, but it feels weird typing that out. I had to keep re-reading it because when talking about a trashy seasonal waifu-bait show, I’ve never put those words together in that order before to describe my opinion on it. And, to all the other reviewers who have criticized this show for being exactly that, I respect your opinion. All your reasons are valid. For me, though, something about this show hit different. This is now a therapy session, you are my therapist, I’m on the couch, and together, we’re going to work through why I gave this show a recommendation. Be ... warned: my insurance sucks.

Before we begin, can we talk about Tomoyuki Itamura? Specifically, I need to know: is this man capable of directing anything other than vampire shows? He got his debut in the big leagues directing a few seasons of Monogatari over at Shaft, then went his own way to direct Vanitas no Karte, and now here he is again. Three vampire shows in a row. I guess stick with what you know, right? Following his career like that reveals a sharp decline after his departure from Shaft; Vanitas was a bit of a train wreck, and seeing his name attached to this show completed the list of red flags for Yofukashi no Uta to be mid-tier seasonal schlock. Show based entirely around the character design of a waifu-bait vampire? Check. Bland loser self-insert main character? Check. Washed up director? Check.

Now here’s the part where I wish I could say this show subverted all those tropes, but it didn’t. It leaned into them in exactly the way that the anime market in 2022 demands. We’re at a point where as long as you have a striking unique character design, it doesn’t even matter what actually happens in the show. You can put Komi-san’s face on the cover of a manga and sell shedloads of copies to people who just want to see that particular character interact with other characters because she’s cute, and we’ll gobble up anything with that winning formula.

And let me tell you, Yofukashi no Uta knows EXACTLY what it’s doing. Take the ED for example. Literally the ENTIRE ED is just shots of Nazuna. Nazuna crouching, Nazuna pointing, Nazuna making sexy face #1, Nazuna making sexy face #37. All while Creepy Nuts (I love Japanese bands that pick two random English words for their names) lays down an absolute banger track behind it all. I skipped the OP after the first time I heard it but man, I let that ED play out in full every time, and it was glorious. It’s like Itamura is saying, “Yes, we know you’re here because of Nazuna. Please enjoy this slideshow of fanservice as your reward for sticking through the episode.” None of this is unearned, by the way, because Nazuna’s design is actually goated. My favorite detail (and this really applies to all the vampires in the show) is how whenever we see her hands in a closeup shot, they’re slightly “knobby” in a creepy vampire-ish way. Not too much to be unsexy of course, but enough to make me realize that hands are not generally one of the distinguishing characteristics of an anime character design.

I mentioned three paragraphs back that this show had a bland, self-insert loser main guy, which is probably the biggest thing that took me out of the show. We’re expected to believe way too many outlandish things with this guy. We’re given almost no information about him, his personal life, or anything prior to his decision to take night walks, which means we don’t really understand why he wants to become a vampire so much. The show alludes to it stemming from him wanting to escape the mundanity of his life, but we never actually SEE that mundanity. For someone to be as dead-set on vampirification as this guy it really seems like a heavier backstory or stronger motivation would be warranted. We’re also expected to believe that someone like Nazuna would be into him. Now, bear in mind, Nazuna is a VAMPIRE. We know based on the joke where she pulls out a cell phone from the 80s that she’s probably at least in her 40s or 50s. Kou is FOURTEEN. I know there are gross people out there whose existence is an exception to this next statement, but 50 year olds aren’t into 14 year olds. I don’t care that Nazuna isn’t “physically” that old, she’s been around that long so she’s mentally that old. Not that it matters much, because she doesn’t act her age either–really rounding out the list of reasons why characters don’t behave in believable ways in this show.

So after reading all this you’re probably thinking, “Nise, I thought at the beginning of this review you said you liked this show?” And you’re right. Despite all the valid criticisms of this show, I overall enjoyed it, even though I generally hate shows like this. I think some of it comes down not just to personal taste but personal experience–I worked 12 hour night shifts for half a decade and took lots and lots of night walks to take my mind off things. I know from personal experience the truth of what Nazuna says about the night: the whole world seems different.

I also think this show portrays evil and temptation in a more realistic way than most shows with a similar target demographic. In a lot of shounen, for example, the big bad is some kind of comically over-the-top bad guy with a raspy voice and an evil lair and who loves drowning kittens. That’s a portrayal of evil that works because it’s obvious. But except for the handful of people who grow up to be Jeffrey Dahmer, that’s not the kind of “bad” or “evil” that’s a real temptation for anyone. The more insidious temptation in life is to give up and just be trashy. That’s really what Nazuna represents: not vicious evil, but acedia and laziness. She’s not much of a major threat to anyone, but she does like to lay around an empty apartment and waste her time playing video games and teasing people with sex jokes–basically a NEET with extra steps.

Nazuna’s foil then is Akira, who represents the will to be productive. She encourages Kou to go back to school, start sleeping at night again, and generally get his crap together. But the thing I like about the way she’s written is that she’s not pushy or preachy about it. She’s content to just gently encourage Kou, and then wait for him to make the right choice on his own, if that’s what he eventually wants to do. That’s actually the mature and grounded way to handle a situation like that if you have a friend you’re concerned about. Gently encourage, but understand you can’t control another person. Overall, a nice piece of mature writing coming from a place you wouldn’t expect it. The show is also pretty legitimately funny, from the cell phone gag to the walkie-talkie wrist watches gag. Anime jokes don’t typically land with me, but this show had me tickled.

To finally wrap this long thing up, this is not a perfect show. Far from it in fact, and if you’re one of the people who couldn’t make it through episode 1 I fully understand. But as one of the people who should feel that way and doesn’t, I thought I’d articulate some of those reasons here and hopefully some folks will give this show a second chance. You might find there’s more beneath the surface than you thought.

Everybody loves Re:Zero. At the time of writing this, the first season sits at #21 on MAL’s popularity chart. The first half of the second season is ranked within the top 100 anime of all time by user ratings. And season 2 part 2 is currently sitting at #40 in those same ratings. So I guess it’s up to me to be the lone dissenting voice in the crowd: while I liked the original show, I do not like this sequel.

Part 2 of season 2 has done nothing to fix the problems I had with part 1. First of all, we’re now 17 episodes in ... and we’re STILL in the Sanctuary arc. This one arc is shaping up to rival the length of the entire first season. If you’re invested in this story, great. But if (like me) you’re not feeling it, then oh boy… strap in, because you get nothing but this one arc. It absolutely baffles me how they managed to take everything set up in the first season and deliver on none of it. Remember the Royal Selection candidates that we spent several arcs establishing characterization and relationships with at the end of the first season? Gone. Instead, we’re introduced to a whole new cast of characters that take center stage and all of them are shallower than the ones we already know. Nobuhiko Okamoto (Bakugou, My Hero Academia) lends his voice to the character of Garfiel, and he sounds the same as he does in every other character he’s ever voiced. Apparently, constant obnoxious shouting is a character trait to these writers. Rounding out the new cast are Ryuuzu Birma (voiced by Aimi Tanaka of Umaru-chan) who exists solely as an exposition dump, and the Seven Deadly Sins witches, who exist to make me wish I was watching Fullmetal Alchemist.

The dialogue in this show is atrocious. Characters repeat themselves endlessly and say nothing of importance, or speak in vagaries to make the show seem deeper than it is. These conversations do not feel like conversations real people would ever have, which is a major problem because dialogue is almost all this show has. In a good dialogue-driven show like the Monogatari series, we’re treated to stunning and varied visuals to keep our eyes occupied while the conversations happen. In Re:Zero season 2, we get exactly ONE location: the middle of the woods. When part 2 aired, I was begging for this show to take me somewhere—ANYWHERE—else. As of episode 4, we are still in the middle of the woods. Boring.

A good show has stakes, and in a good show you can feel them at all times. At the beginning of season 2 part 1, we’re shown Rem in a coma having been consumed by Gluttony and having all memory of her erased, and the writing sets it up to seem like our mission this season is to save Rem. Those are the stakes. But we’ve become so deeply embroiled in this Sanctuary “side quest” that none of the actions any of the characters are taking seem directly related to our main goal: saving Rem. Instead, we went to the mansion to talk to Betty, who sent us to talk to Roswaal, and on the way got caught up in saving the half-human populace of this Sanctuary. The problem is: I don’t care about any of these people as much as I care about Rem. We barely even get to see the people we’re supposedly saving. There’s one shot of some half-humans living in shambles at the beginning of the last cour, and we only get one or two scenes with the human villagers who are captive there. Technically we do already know the villagers (they’re the ones Subaru did radio calisthenics with in season 1), but we hardly know any of them as individual characters. So, why should we care about saving them? And how exactly are we moving the overarching plot forward? I know the answer has to do with Roswaal’s plan, but it’s so muddled underneath layers of plot that we feel no closer to saving Rem than we did at the start of season 2. I guess Roswaal’s motivations have more to do with forcing Subaru into an impossible situation where he can't save everybody, but the upshot of that is that it feels like all our main goals have ground to a halt so that we can run around in the woods for 17 episodes.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I have to keep this review short enough that people will actually read it. Overall, Re:Zero season 2 part 2 has done nothing so far to tie up the loose ends presented by part 1, and hasn’t addressed any of my major issues with season 2 as a whole. Here’s to hoping White Fox can turn things around and give us the satisfying season we should have gotten from the start.

Oh boy. This is a review I wish I didn’t have to write. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou was my most anticipated show from the Fall 2020 season, but in its current state it’s shaping up to be a disappointment to fans of the original, and confusing to newcomers to the series. Disclaimer: this show is still ongoing. All of my thoughts are subject to change as the show progresses. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

I’m not sure if Passione ever officially said this would be a remake, but that’s definitely what everyone thought it was going to be. Google “Higurashi ... remake” and you’ll see what I mean. Well, turns out that they pulled a fast one on us and instead of giving the original series the Fruits Basket treatment, this is actually (kinda?) a third season! I’m not marking that as a spoiler since it’s obvious from episode 1. The way they’ve done this is weird though. Instead of all new content, they’re remaking the arcs from the original show but giving them different endings. I’m sure as the season progresses it’ll deviate more and more from the first season, but the unfortunate consequence of that decision is that it leads your brain to make direct comparisons to the original show. So, how does the new one stack up to the old one? So far, not so well.

The first issue I have with Gou is the animation. Let’s think back to the original show; we all know Studio Deen is famous for… ahem… “subpar” animation. And the old Higurashi definitely suffered from that, mainly in the first season. Characters were often drawn off-model, backgrounds were simple, character proportions were kinda off, movement was stiff. But the one thing Deen did right is they basically had 2 “modes” for the show: moe mode, and horror mode. During the majority of the show when characters were acting normally, everything had a bright moe look. But when the horror started, everything about the art style changed. Lighting got darker, camera angles went askew, and character proportions changed. You could tell just from the stylistic changes that some serious stuff was about to go down. Sometimes they’d even use that as a fake-out—they’d change to “horror” mode, but the scene would pass and nothing would happen. That added suspense and tension, and kept us as the audience from ever getting too comfortable in this world.

The new show is bright and moe all. the. time. Even during the kills. I’ve seen people try to defend that as being some kind of deliberate contrast. “It’s supposed to be shocking seeing these cute characters covered in blood and killing people!” Yeah, that’s shocking, but it’s not scary. The worst change has probably been to the famous “Higurashi face”. You know the one, it’s been imitated in almost every horror anime since. In the original show, characters’ faces would become heavily distorted during the intense horror scenes, sometimes to an almost unrecognizable extent. In the new one, they stay too moe. They eyes are still too soft and round and the expressions aren’t as intense. I was really excited to see the Higurashi face updated to 2020 animation standards, but from its first appearance, I’ve been disappointed.

The second issue I have is with the writing. The original Higurashi was, in my opinion, a masterclass in tight writing. Every episode flew by; 24 minutes always felt like 5. This is because every line mattered. Every conversation mattered. Every scene mattered. You couldn’t take anything away from the original show without losing something. That’s how a good show should be, it keeps you engaged by always feeding you relevant information. The way a show starts to drag is by having lines of pointless dialogue, characters repeating themselves, or having filler scenes that go nowhere. That’s the trap (pun intended) the new show is starting to fall into.

For example, in the original show, we establish early in the second season that the character Satoko makes traps. It’s established quickly in one scene in episode 2, it’s played for laughs in episode 3, and it isn’t brought up again until it becomes relevant to the plot. And in each of those instances, we’re taught something about the other characters, too; it doesn’t JUST establish Satoko’s trap-making skill. In the new show, we establish her trap-making skill in the first 10 minutes of episode 1 in a new scene where she hides a blackboard eraser in a doorjamb. Keiichi falls for it, and then the characters practically mug to the camera and go “Hey, did you know, SATAKO MAKES TRAPS???” And then again, at the end of the same episode, Satoko wins their scavenger hunt for a marker with a trap which, this time, makes no sense how she could have set one up without knowing ahead of time where the marker was. A throwaway line like, “Satoko has traps set all over the school!” could have explained it away, but we get nothing. Instead, it just re-establishes what we already know.

There’s an even worse example in episode 4 where Keiichi ends up in the hospital after being attacked by a certain character. Ooshi walks into his hospital room and asks him to explain what happened, and Keiichi basically tells him he doesn’t know what happened. Ooshi says “I’ll visit again soon. Feel better.” and walks out. I still don’t understand what the point of that interaction was. We already know Keiichi is confused, that interaction didn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know about the characters or the plot.

One other thing that bothers me is how early they’re revealing an important aspect of a certain character. I won’t get into detail on that one because it’s major spoilers if you haven’t watched either show, but suffice to say that if you’re a newcomer and you start with Gou, you will have certain elements of the original spoiled for you if you do decide to go back and watch the original show. That wouldn’t matter if this was a direct remake, but like I said before, it seems like it’s a third season, meaning you still have to watch the original to get the full story.

Overall, I think it’s still too early to tell how good this show will ultimately be. But as of episode 6, there are some early warning signs that this season might not live up to the legendary status of its predecessors. Here’s to hoping they manage to surprise us.

Somali and the Forest Spirit is a show that takes a familiar premise and executes it in a familiar (and slightly uninspired) way. The formula of an emotionally distant person being thrust into the role of father-figure and learning to adapt along the way can be an emotionally gripping one, if it’s told with care. Somali and the Forest Spirit adds a ticking-clock element and fantastical world to create a nice inoffensive story about parenthood.

To begin with positives, the art style of this show is beautiful. Each environment has a sort of watercolor aesthetic to it, making for rich backgrounds that compliment the wonderful character ... designs. While the animation is rarely impressive, it gets the job done without common mistakes—like characters being off-model. On all technical fronts, this show is solid.

The problems lie with the structure of the story. We’re introduced to our two main characters, and immediately there is an inseparable, unbreakable bond between Somali and the forest golem. Any real child would be immediately terrified of this scary skull-faced monster, but not Somali. The forest golem at least realistically takes some time to warm up to Somali, but the growth of the relationship is presented in one flashback in one episode towards the end of the show. In a well-told version of this story, Somali and the golem would get off to a rocky start, but over time grow to love each other, and we as the audience would be shown this progression.

Our two main characters are also fairly flat. Somali has one personality trait: she’s a genki kid. The forest golem has one personality trait: he’s a stoic automaton—even his face is deliberately designed to be expressionless. It’s very difficult to buy into the depth of their relationship when the characters themselves are so simple. Maybe in future installations of this series their relationship and personalities will be explored, but since the first season of this show is all that’s complete, we have to judge it as a standalone work.

Overall, your enjoyment of this show will depend on how much you’re able to buy into Somali and the golem’s father-daughter relationship. If the show manages to grab your heartstrings in the first few episodes, it’ll be a win for you. Otherwise, consider it safe to skip.

Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun created high expectations at the start of the Winter 2020 anime season, and didn't deliver. Instead what we got was a dry, formulaic show with little characterization and even less animation.

To start with, the most immediately eye-catching thing about this show when scrolling through seasonals is the art style. Mayuka Itou and the rest of the staff clearly faced a decision when trying to adapt the extremely detailed source material: simplify the designs so that they're easier to animate, or stick to the level of detail of the original manga. Unfortunately, they chose the latter. While it's interesting to see a show ... where every individual frame is so detailed it could be a desktop wallpaper, it comes at the cost of actual animation. Simply put: the characters barely move. The show is so stiff to look at that it makes me wonder why someone wouldn't just go read the manga.

The problems don't end with the animation. The story is a bland Monogatari-series style haunted-school affair, although where Monogatari was creative and had interesting characters, Jibaku has none of those. Our main antagonists are causing supernatural shenanigans, but their motivations for doing so are never clearly stated. Characters are flat and impossible to imagine existing outside the world of the show. The tone of the show also fluctuates constantly; it's like the show doesn't know if it wants to be creepy, funny, or dramatic, so it tries to be all three, sometimes within a single scene. This mish-mash of emotions makes the show come off as tone-deaf. Each episode follows a very repetitive formula: Nene gets into trouble with a ghost, Hanako saves her, repeat. The only real props I can give are to the voice acting. Megumi Ogata (Shinji Ikari from Evangelion) brings her buttery voice to give a fantastic performance as Hanako.

Overall, if the premise of Jibaku seems interesting, maybe read the manga. As it stands, this is an anime safe to skip.