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Cute, mildly queer Slice of Life fun, plus a classic action-thriller-with-confusing-politics anime setup? You wouldn't expect those two things to work well together, but they honestly really do here.

It's almost entirely thanks to the extremely strong character work all throughout the show. The main characters Takina and Chisato are intensely compelling, two of the best anime protagonists in recent memory, and the entire supporting cast is memorable as well. No annoying stock character stereotypes, no contrived conflicts to make the characters clash. There's not a weak link as far as characters go, and that alone propels it really well.

The story is cute and intense at ... once, and for the most part does a really nice balancing act of switching the tone back and forth without giving you whiplash. A rare feat for anime!

Sadly, while the first half has a cool mystery and some intriguing romance, the second half, as everything gets revealed, just sort of concludes in exactly the standard anime way you'd expect. Everything wraps up way too neatly, and nothing fundamental is addressed with any depth, from the romance to the politics to the sheer logistics of it all.

I can tell this is going to be a very fun series to watch with more seasons in the future, although I dearly hope they go in a bolder direction with all of that. I'm just glad the show is a big enough hit to justify more.

Happy 2021 everyone! I started my year off with this 12-episode anime series about the sport of Soft Tennis, popular in East Asia but virtually unknown elsewhere. I'm not really one for sports series because they tend to follow the exact same structure almost universally, but this one's really interesting because it basically takes the entire team of middle schoolers and peels back the layers to show the quite broken or complicated family lives each one of them has. There are some really mean parents in this show!

It covers all sorts of topics like depression, neglect, abuse, poverty, and all that stuff that Japanese dramas ... often handle really poorly... and I won't say it did an amazing job here, but it was sometimes so over the top that it sort of worked. Unlike certain other shows I wasn't ever actively put off by it, at least, so it's no Angel Beats or anything.

Much more interesting to me was the fact that the story features, with great care in every case, character types that are often completely ignored in Japanese animation (or animation in general): an overweight character (not maligned in any way), half-Japanese character (which you almost never see in anime), and even a nonbinary character (which you NEVER see in anime). Just representing these types of people in a story that has nothing to do with them... it really, really leaves a positive mark even if it doesn't affect the quality of the show in any way.

And unfortunately it's just a sports anime so it's not exactly anything groundbreaking. And worst off, it leaves on a completely unresolved note; the show was apparently split in half mid-production, with the second season not currently in production. Until that comes out, this thing is too incomplete to feel like a very memorable piece of work. It has a lot to like, but not enough to love to overcome the fact that it's just not finished.

This OVA makes the case for the sheer extent that good direction matters when adapting a work.

Robert Rodriguez's live-action movie contains a good 75% of the same story beats and all of the same characters as this movie here, but thanks to Rodriguez's keen eye for visuals and his ability to elicit strong performances from his actors, that version stands strong.

In comparison, this OVA here is a far inferior version of the same story, coasting by on the strength of the source material and that's it. The animation is fairly poor, the art direction isn't as impressive, and the bizarre choice was made to ... feature almost no soundtrack whatsoever--sometimes a really neat choice, but here it didn't help things at all because the pacing was so janky.

It's certainly not the worst movie in the world, but I'm really glad I didn't watch this OVA before I saw the live-action movie, because it would have killed most of my excitement at the time.

Despite having nothing at all to do with Oz and having the production values of, well, a 1992 anime OVA, there's some pretty funky stuff in this movie that makes it interesting to the point that if trashy late 80s/early 90s sci-fi is your thing, it's worth checking out. The second episode is much more interesting than the first, even if the ending isn't exactly gonna blow your mind or anything.

For some reason there's an actual transgender character in the story and a frank discussion about it, even going far enough to use the word dysphoria and everything. I mean, it's handled about as well ... as you'd expect from a 1992 anime OVA, but the fact that it is there adds another layer of funk to what should have been a super generic and edgy action movie.

This is too long, yet too simple to be anything more than a novelty, but I think this is definitely in the upper level of the Dragon Ball Z movies, and by FAR the best of all the TV specials/OVAs. We get to see the story of a villain falling into a seeming curse and then failing just at the last moment to prevent disaster.

Basically, this is a kind of Greek Tragedy-lite, Revenge of the Sith-style story where Bardock sees visions of a future he doesn't understand, visions of his son's accomplishments, and in his quest to figure them out and prevent tragedy, ends up ... causing everything to transpire exactly as he foresaw it. Now, probably the biggest thing holding it back is that, yeah, the Sayians probably did deserve everything they had coming to them; they had been genociding planet after planet for countless generations, and our own protagonist is so complicit that our introduction to him is his squad massacring civilians on some alien world. Yeah, he kinda realizes his mistakes, but he definitely doesn't go anywhere near atoning for them. I don't feel any sadness at what happens to him or any of the others.

But the story isn't expecting us to do so; it's not quite a condemnation of the Sayians like the show is, but it's certainly not sympathetic to them. And for something as dumb as Dragon Ball, I kind of appreciate that tiny bit of nuance. So, as far as Dragon Ball goes, this one's pretty good.

Like my last review on "Pink: Water Bandit, Rain Bandit," we get another extremely solid, very funny adventure short out of an old Akira Toriyama one-shot manga. This one's longer, actually feature-length at 47 minutes, and drags a bit accordingly; the first half is more talky than I'd like, and the world is a bit less vibrant than the likes of "Pink" or either of Toriyama's mainworks (Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump, if you somehow don't know). Still, when this gets going, it GETS GOING.

If I recall correctly, "Dragon of Konpei Island" as a manga was essentially the prototype pilot episode for what would become ... Dragon Ball, and you get a whole lot of similarities here. Martial arts super kids, a smart young lady, an evil eccentric army out looking for a prized orb... it's very Dragon Ball-esque. And, thanks to an bubble economy-level budget, even this direct-to-video movie has some incredibly impressive fight scenes. They're fun to watch and very dynamic; very good stuff.

I wouldn't say this is anything "super special you gotta watch it," but if this is in your wheelhouse, you'll have a good time.

Ah man! This thing's awesome! Thanks to Akira Toriyama's impeccable cartoonish worldbuilding sense, and some really funny moments, this thing's a fast-paced adventure that easily rivals the best of Dragon Ball. The short length of one-off OVAs sometimes work against themselves, but this one makes the best of it; it doesn't overstay its welcome and doesn't get involved in any subplots to slow things down.

Watch this if you enjoy fun. Don't watch this if you hate happiness.

Also, one of the villains speaks in Nagoya dialect, which is how you know Toriyama put his all into his work because he only ever does that when ... he really wants to make an impression on you.

This thing's wild. It's a jumbled up montage of music videos stripped of context, and then an MTV-style "real bro interviews" thing where the main actor has a very noticeable accent, completely breaking the illusion of the character, along with a few real bad voice actors to go along with it.

Yep, this is a Japanese anime movie where it's voiced entirely in English. It's not much better than you'd expect.

It's wild and barely comprehensible, but it's also pretty short. 15 minutes of the 40 minute runtime are actually a making-of featurette after the fact; that's pretty nice and I appreciate it.

Not as good as the poster would suggest, and nowhere close to its sequel Redline, but Trava: Fist Planet is pretty good, and very goofy. I love just how strange the sci-fi world in Redline was, and we get to see even more of it here, even if it isn't nearly as entertaining. I'm not normally a fan of this very "Adult Swim"-esque risque and racy sci-fi world, but for some reason Redline, and Trava by extension, work very well for me.

I feel like I'd have enjoyed this way more, except that this only had Hungarian subtitles, and the English ones refused to load. Some ... of these characters were real big mumblers, I'll tell ya that. Very hard to understand mumbling. Speak up!

This is really good, though some of the grossout/ultra-violence humor was a little too much for me. It's like they compressed an entire mediocre 13-epsiosde anime into 55 minutes, and I LOVE that. If you think Mad Max Fury Road had a crazy-fast opening scene, just watch the first five minutes of Dead Leaves. Seriously, this was really awesome, and it's pretty as hell.

Director Imaishi Hiyoyuki has a very nice reputation for his insane works filled with excess and violence and racy elements, and while I think Dead Leaves is a success story in that regard, I also think it isn't fully refined into what ... would eventually become much greater works like Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill. So this movie is more like a very solid prototype.