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Dominion is an extremely strange anime. Masamune Shirow has many ideas and many things to say. Anybody who knows more than the superficial about him knows that he's hard to neatly categorise as an author. Ghost in the Shell is a thought-provoking milestone in the medium coming from that mind and although Dominion is also thought-provoking, it is so in a much meta-textual way. I will presently attempt to articulate why.

From the very second it starts, Dominion appears to present itself as biting commentary on police brutality and excess. The first minutes are spent hearing (voice-off) a heated discussion between a police chief and the ... mayor of that city. As the mayor struggles to keep her composture and argue rationally about the necessity for the police to minimise civilian casualties stemming from police misuse of extreme force (via military tanks deployed in the streets), the chief uses screaming, bombastic arguments and logical fallacies to argue for the necessity of even more force than that, less oversight and, of course, more funding. You could have easily think that this was a very facile caricature of American law enforcement following certain events in the mid-2010s but this story was written in the mid 80s, which in itself is both remarkably prescient and quite depressing.

If you thought that this was setting the stage for a grim analogy on the corruption observed and expected in law enforcement, you may be surprised to find out it's not the case as they are the protagonists of the series. Although the series does parody (to a rather great comedic effect) the police forces' ineptitude, cruelty, and proneness to violence and excess, nowhere besides that intro dialogue and a blink-and-you-miss-it part near the end are those traits condemned, let alone met with consequences. Even the sympathetic rookie that we could have expected to become a motor for change, or at the very least a permanently horrified straight-woman, does little else than pushing against the (also expected) prevalent sexism in the institution, before being widely embraced by it when she proved she could be as bad or even worse as the lot of them.

I was constantly puzzled trying to figure out what was Shirow trying to say with this piece. Does he ultimately agree with the police stance that the necessity for their existence justifies their excesses no matter how bad? Or did he simply choose, for some reason, a complex real life issue as the backdrop for his sci-fi comedy featuring a gang of irredeemable fuck-ups? Then you have to add to this a rather significant amount of the runtime (for its scant 4 episodes) spent in intriguing worldbuilding (that sort of goes nowhere) or almost a whole episode worth of delving into the main antagonist's backstory for a dramatic and gripping commentary on the inhuman lenghts to which humans can go in the name of scientific progress as way to understand their own existence.

Having said that, by the end, the story is expertly told and wrapped up satisfactorily. In short, it is a good watch but one that might leave more questions in your mind than answers were received. And, I posit, maybe that's not a bad thing.

Giant Robo is a remarkably strange anime. it's opening episode starts in media res and through exposition and characters' interactions we are made to feel that we are being caught up with a story previously seen on a lenghty classical 80s anime and what we are about to see is the crowning arc of the tale that had not been previously animated. We get hintsand glimpses of a succession of robots defeated in the past, of deep seated rivalries, origin stories, mysteries, and character arcs. However, when you take a minute to check if you maybe should watch that series before you watch this, ... you realise that there's not such a thing. And when you decide to go to the manga for the original source, you find out that it was a short, rather silly spy thriller with a few names that you may recognise and a Giant Robo that looks so goofy as to be near unrecognisable.

You realise, then, that you were had and that GR:TA successfully packed massive amounts of worldbuilding in what was pretty much a fake recap for something that never existed.

The series then proceeds to touch upon and develop several important and profound themes such as energy crises, the irrationality of nuclear panic, the burden that parents put on their children when they expect them to carry on with their legacies, the perils of the recklessness of progress, and whether happiness and peace can be achieved without sacrifice. This is a quote from the series that shows how heacy it can go with those themes:

"For oil, man once fought and killed the whale. Later, they fought and killed each other."

Watching some of the scenes in the first couple of episodes, it's hard not to imagine a disgruntled anime director, one Hideaki Anno, watching it the year it was released and getting some inspiration and ideas for an inconsequential anime he'd create shortly after. But I digress.

In addition to the impressive worldbuilding and powerful themes, the series also sported extremely well crafted animation, a potent soundtrack, and appealing character design that married a retro aesthetic to the best of the early 90s sensibilities. So why, you must be wondering, did I only give 7 to this OVA?

Unfortunately, too enamoured with its themes and the pure spectacle it offered from one impressive action set to the next, the story was extremely liberal with the way it pushed suspension of disbelief. Powerful, moving, or thrilling scenes often came as result of near non-sensical or pointless actions by the characters to the point that it was obvious that the big moments were planned first and the connective tissue was haphazardly woven after the fact. Similarly, dramatic twists and reveals were masked by the use of devices or artifice that was jarringly unbelieavable even in a setting with giant robots and superhumans. Had this sort of thing happened only a few times, it would have not been enough to detract from the great elements of the series. However it happened frequently enough that by the end, it all had aggregated on a nettling buzz of annoyance at not being able to apply the slightest amount of critical thinking to developments and characters actions without they crumbing down in front of your own eyes.

Still I recommend this series and I don't regret watching it, and I don't think you will, either.

If you are reading this review, I am presuming that you have already finished the first series, so I'll be dealing on spoilers from season 1.

As I mentioned in my review of the first series, after meandering a bit too long in what seemed like disconnected, iterating plots with seemingly random variations, the series plays its ace: The revelation that a significant part of the events portrayed are presented as seen through the eyes of increasingly neurotic and paranoid people, to the point of sometimes being outright hallucinations. A brilliant case of "unreliable director", if you will.

The chief effect of that revelation is to bring ... into focus the events that—disregarding variation and apparent cause—repeat themselves in each or most of the plot lines, as they become a rule to discern fact from hallucination. With the series' last (and unsurprising) revelation that one of the characters is jumping back in time a la Groundhog's Day, Higurashi goes all of a sudden from mediocre gory horror to enthralling mystery that you feel encouraged to solve.

I was expecting Kai to go along the lines of the previous series, a succession of irrelevant, unrelated timelines where you would be able to glean some nuggets of truth from the information previously gained. However, where series one was abstruse, Kai was straightforward, happening in a mostly linear continuity. Where series one raised so many questions that you could only hope to be asking the /right/ questions, Kai dispenses answers and fills apparent plot holes with generosity. That is not to say that it is heavy handed or overly expository. It manages to artfully leave clues and outright answers just laying around for attentive viewers to pick up and make sense of.

Another big triumph of Kai is the character development, which had been almost completely stagnant in series one. Finally "our heroes" become real people that we can care for and cheer on as they start making use of their agency, as opposed to being the mere puppets that we cynically got to watch murdering and being murdered over and over.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned, production values were raised across the board with greatly improved character design and animation.

It is a pity that series one was so flawed. Kai is so good that I actually went and raised the score I had initially given it first, but, similarly, I'm giving Kai a lower score than it deserves, because it cannot be enjoyed separately from that big mess. Nevertheless, both together are something that I definitely recommend.

Higurashi season 1 is a flawed gem. Be warned that you'll see the flaws, long, long before you realise that you are looking at a gem. The character design is awful, the characters themselves are stereotyped cliches, the attempts at humour and levity are cringe-worthy, and the voice acting is mediocre at best, jarring and clumsy at worst. Even the shocking moments the series is known for barely will manage to raise eyebrows a couple times, if you have seen almost any modern anime.

Even the story is seemingly disappointing. A series of arcs of varying quality repeating the passing of same two weeks over and ... over, while some characters and events apparently change radically between them. However, that's where the genius of the script comes in: towards the end of the last arc, a small revelation put the whole series in a new perspective and as understanding dawns, you cannot help but awe at its cleverness. Moreover, the delivery revelation was not a lengthy, ham-fisted exposition as it's often the case; a few seconds of previously seen footage with but a few words and all of a sudden, all pieces fall into place.

As you watch this series you may wonder why you are still watching it and consider dropping it. Don't. The pay-off is entirely worth it.

Children Who Chase Voices is an undisguised love letter to studio Ghibli and the anime of the early nineties. With a setting and visual elements reminiscent of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and character and monster design that you could insert into Princess Mononoke and not notice an intrusion, and a narrative structure and a plot following conventions from fantasy anime from that era (championed by Escaflowne, which the movie references visually at least a couple times,) it is clear for the long-time anime watcher that Makoto Shinkai is crafting a beautiful "thank you" card to the medium that inspired him to become ... who he is now.

It is also -as we all have learned to love and expect- breathtakingly beautiful in its large panoramic vistas of long-grassed fields and cloud-layered, color-tinted skies and his signature railway crossroads. The world is imaginative and vibrant and the action scenes beautifully animated and choreographed. Speaking of expectations, the theme of "distance" is heavily played but manages to never cloy.

However, the movie falls prey to its own good intentions. Trying to include too many trappings and conventions of the medium he's paying an homage to, the result is not unlike that of a patchwork that had to sacrifice character development and proper, cohesive narrative to make room for all of it. The jerkiness in plot and character development make the story hard to believe and the characters hard to empathize with, giving the general effect of having cut most of the "boring" character-establishment, emotion-development, sense of wonder and personal reflection to give you all the thrilling plot-advancing bits it could pack in two hours.

Without a doubt, this story would have been much better served as a 24-episode series than as a movie and that without adding much new, really: Just filling the blatant holes in the narrative and pacing the events properly. Having said that, I understand why this is a movie and not a series: its very own premise makes it wholly unoriginal and derivative which would make the series painfully unnecessary and redundant. As a (superbly visually beautiful) movie it stands as a statement of love and gratitude rather than as a rehash or a cash-in.

At this point, I think it's necessary to acknowledge Makoto Shinkai's shortcomings as a teller of epic narratives, which we have seen in his other plot-driven movies. Hopefully, he'll become aware that his real kind of genius is that of the deeply personal, character-driven stories and manage to expertly make of that the focus of the big, sweeping epics he obviously loves to tell.

I still wholeheartedly recommend this movie, specially if you are a fan of nineties anime and studio Ghibli. Its plot may leave you slightly unsatisfied but everything else will make you smile.