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Flip Flappers wears its influences on its sleeve as a love poem to classic Gainax anime like FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but with a unique style that makes it more than worth watching for its own sake. With that said, heed my word: this is a yuri anime, even if it pretends not to be. If you are put off by the male-gazey sexualization and objectification of women and girls, or you hate lesbians, you might want to pass.

This anime is absolutely gorge. It serves cunt. It is extremely stylish, beautifully animated, and the characters are cute, though some of the outfits are a ... little tacky. There are a lot of gratuitous fanservice shots, but even they are stylish, less embarrassing, if only because it hardly feels out of place; shameless excess is the entire thesis. Flip Flappers is unbelievably indulgent, a pure pleasure, like hearing your favorite song on the radio with no advertisements, like picking up a $100 bill off the park bench and spending it on a movie date with your childhood friend who has recently confessed her desire to take "it" "further" who covers her head in your chest at the scary parts and laughs at your unfunny jokes after the viewing while holding on to your arm like a mast in the typhoon and nuzzling into your side like a dog.

But other things are indulgent too, like candy and ice cream. Sometimes your body needs nourishment. Narratively, Flip Flappers suffers just a bit from the problem of revealing its hand all at once and a little too late. A good story is recontextualized by its own development, making subsequent readings more exciting and fulfilling, allowing the reader to put the pieces together and read between the lines. There is not much "between the lines" in Flip Flappers. But that's not what this anime is trying to be, anyway. Flip Flappers is not subtle. It is bombastic, carefree, a little cheugy, like a wedding cake. At a lesbian wedding. I want to fuck Papika so bad it makes my stomach hurt.

Bocchi the Rock! exposes K-ON! for the senseless pandering drivel it always was. There's not much to say about an anime like this because the quality really speaks for itself.

There are a few key things in Bocchi's favor, other than its high production value, unique, experimental animation style, and anomalous lack of sex perverts on the production team: honest writing and actually being funny. Bocchi the Rock! knows it is a band anime as much as it is about the band's members. This is a show about improving at your craft, and improving at that craft with others. It involves the highs and lows of ... laboring for your passion. It has been said that this show accurately portrays the social dynamic of a rock band - to that the reviewer cannot speak, but is not surprised.

You learn to know the characters not just as a collection of shallow tropes bouncing the usual slice gags off each other, but as real (enough) people who subvert their apparent archetypes and grow with one another. And the show doesn't settle for "character transformation" in the most boring and obvious way, like Allison's notorious goth-to-prep makeover in The Breakfast Club. No "ugly ducklings". You will find in Bocchi the Rock! surprisingly deep and likeable characters who betray your expectations of the same old, and they develop in a very natural way.

And it's pretty honest-to-god funny. It shouldn't be surprising when you can't predict a joke's punchline from the setup, but this is the state of anime in 2023. The jokes land. It's comedy. Above all else, at the time of writing, Bocchi the Rock! is worth watching for that alone.

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex has no philosophy. It is a cop show with cyborgs in it. It's immensely disappointing that after 52 total goddamn episodes nothing fucking happens and no lessons are learned and no points are made. "GITS SACK" is stylish but it's not stylish enough to make up for how vapid it is (unlike, for example, Cowboy Bebop). Actually, it's pretty awkward and ugly and the art style suggests this sort of plastic fisher-price quality that totally betrays the maturity it tries to sell. At least the original 1995 movie played to its strengths and focused their budget on the ... animation.

There are no central themes. Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex appears to be "cyberpunk" but it fails to make the one point by which even the most juvenile cyberpunk fiction is held together: capitalism is, like, bad and scary. Fuck that, make them all cops I guess. Beyond that, the show doesn't really leverage its setting to tell the interesting stories that it could. How do you handle the cultural and psychological consequences of "cyberizing" the brain and body? What of the ethics regarding the Tachikomas and their sentience? It kind of just confusedly glazes over all that. GITSSAC does not ask, "what would this mean for our future?" What it does like to ask is, "wouldn't it suck if that happened?" It's a travesty and an utter waste.

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex wants you to think its plot is very deep and very complex, but it also treats you, the audience, like an idiot, by explaining the plot outright in exposition dumps where the characters look directly into the camera and tell you exactly what is happening without giving you the chance to think about it on your own. It's lazy! I thought we all knew by now the old "show don't tell" technique.

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex gestures vaguely in the direction of interesting concepts but it doesn't do anything with them. It just expects you to look in the same direction and think, "woah."

Besides that, it's pretty good for a cop show. And the soundtrack WHIPS.

Sakura Trick aims to instill in the average kissless male otaku a sense of nostalgia for something they never have and never will experience: the innocent passion of sapphic love among high-school children. It succeeds spectacularly.

That this is a genuine love story, not porn, the writing makes clear; no character is obviously written to be the object of voyeuristic sexual desire. Instead this show demands the viewer to empathize directly with the girls and take an active role in their relationship. Despite its almost lecherous depiction of physical intimacy (which is far and away the highlight and major appeal of the show), Sakura Trick ... is tender purely. High-stakes, adult soap drama should be sought elsewhere.

With that said: who on the production team thought the constant, pointless fanservice was a good idea? It seems like they didn't realize what they were working with. Though it wanes in later episodes, the camera often seems to lock between the tropics of boob and crotch, and when it strays it's usually to pan across the character's body from the feet up. Nobody asked for this. A show that desperately wants to break free from the ecchi trappings of its forebears is given no such privilege. Oh well.

Sakura Trick also suffers occasionally from poor production quality; characters go off-model, faces turn out weird and subtly wall-eyed, the animation and style is forgettable. And so on. But generally, with a show like this, one would get burned too often if they expected any better.

Ultimately Sakura Trick is, by way of poor direction, dangling between a rock and a hard place and another more desirable thing to be stuck between: is it ecchi? Is it mindless slice comedy? Or is it a touching, subversive story about forbidden love shared between two flawed but compelling characters? When it is this third thing, Sakura Trick soars. That just doesn't happen enough.

Fans may tell you that Higurashi When They Cry is an "emotional rollercoaster". It's more like a drive-thru. And you've ordered a nothing burger.

Touted by internet typewriter monkeys as "the best horror anime," Higurashi When They Cry apparently proves that there is no good horror anime. Or, at least, there wasn't any in 2006. Anime fans of the time were so starved for a decent scare that you'd think a white bedsheet with cut-out eye-holes would have done the trick, so Higurashi When They Cry certainly must have blown a handful of otaku minds clean open when it first aired. But the year is ... 2022. We are not cavemen anymore. We have modern sensibilities, technology, therapy.

Higurashi When They Cry wants to be schizophrenic for the internet cool points, because it really has NPD. Higurashi's veneer of depth eventually betrays its superficiality - a façade which, when unveiled, reveals an ugly, seedy interior of poor pacing, one-note character writing, and a series of twists which fail to shock because Higurashi When They Cry never asks the viewer to care. Attempts to manipulate the audience are impotent and unintentionally laughable. I'm glad Hitchcock is dead.

Not to outdo itself, Higurashi When They Cry also boasts a tremendously tacky art style. It would have at least been funnier if they kept the meat mittens.

Girls' Last Tour manages to have something to say about everything yet ultimately it really says nothing at all. That's ok.

Girls' Last Tour has many faces. Sometimes, Girls' Last Tour is a confusing commentary on the futility of human conflict. Other times, Girls' Last Tour is a cooking anime that dares to ask, "what if anime food didn't look very tasty at all?" Most of the time, Girls' Last Tour is a comfortably moe, satisfyingly blobby, slice-of-life romp, despite everything.

I have a feeling the creator of Girls' Last Tour has a fixation on two things in particular: cute girls and esoteric mechanisms of war (both ... the physical sort as well as the psychological). And for fans of those things, Girls' Last Tour delivers the goods. In a way, Girls' Last Tour might be the greatest post-apocalyptic adventure drama that comedy slice fans have been asking for.

When producing a slapstick-comedy-slice-of-life-high-school-anime, you COULD dump duffel bags of money onto the floor of the animation department, dispense to each employee a drip feeder of amphetamine salts, and look over them with a knowing grin and a sparkle in your eye that says, "it's a long shot, but, God willing, it just might work."

And, in return, you would get Nichijou.

Azumanga Daioh takes the opposite approach. Held together by twigs and glue in comparison to the more modern, sleek, slice-of-life anime, Azumanga Daioh is nonetheless the ur-"cute girls doing cute things" series, and its purity of essence is still unparalleled twenty years after ... the fact. Azumanga Daioh makes good use of a seemingly modest budget, which is complemented by an excellent localization by A.D. Vision (of Ghost Stories fame). Gags that were given no more than a page in the original 4-koma manga are allowed much more room to develop, with minutes of runtime every episode dedicated to stretching out the joke, focusing on characters' reactions, often nonverbal. While there are a couple particularly dated, out-of-place gags (Kimura), the style of comedy in Azumanga Daioh is undeniably so influential as to be foundational for the genre yet executed so perfectly that it stands alone. Considering this is an adaptation of a work by Kiyohiko Azuma, that is just par for the course.

To some degree, the pacing and structure is just as much a product of studio limitations. The animation is unimpressive. Cells are constantly reused, and you'll see frequent panning & zooming across still frames, or loops of 1-3 frames for several seconds, usually (but not always) with dialogue in the background. Bordering on the avant-garde, it is not uncommon for Azumanga Daioh to have periods of 30 seconds at a time where you are shown just two or three different frames and no dialogue. This doesn't really matter. Azumanga Daioh uses the medium for exactly two things: jokes and moe. Trying to do any more than what it does is just a liability.

You probably won't even notice how thin this show spreads itself visually, because the score and voice acting are perfectly done in both languages. This is one anime where it is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged—if only by the reviewer—to occasionally swap between the sub and the dub, to taste. If you have done so, the reason should be obvious. If you haven't, do.

Actually, that is my sentiment on watching Azumanga Daioh in the first place.