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Based on some of the first published, literary attempts of Kinoko Nasu, later of Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night fame, Kara no Kyoukai already contains many of the traits he would later streamline and perfect for a wider audience, such as the tough female heroine, the sadomasochistic undertones, the complex and rich background always only subtly hinted at, the long and intense fights, the melancholy air and tragic outcomes, and the peculiar borrowing of techniques from literary modernism. What his later works lack is the sort of daring and ruthlessness most commonly seen in young, still unaccomplished writers: In a recent interview he admitted that the ... novel had partly been meant as a prank. Self-printed in a copy shop and sold at a comics convention, Kara no Kyoukai, despite containing anime illustration and tropes, throws the reader into the middle of the story, only returning much later to explain even the most basic things about the characters. It's also written in a very old-fashioned style that even gives many Japanese native speakers a lot of trouble. Though cutting back on a particularly nonsensical discussion on heights, this movie adaption mostly stays true to his youthful spirit. So why does it work so well?

It's in the heat of summer and for mysterious reasons high school girls are frequently throwing themselves off an old, abandoned skyscraper during night in modern Tokyo. Shiki Ryougi becomes curious, a girl who can see "death lines" that allow her to kill anything having them as long as she traces the lines, even with her fingernail, and who wears a leather jacket over an anachronistic kimono. The cause of the suicides, unsurprisingly, is partly paranormal. What makes Kara no Kyoukai different from most other horror/mystery animes though, is the way it is told. The characters speculate in a strange, almost technical, philosophical-sounding manner about the causes of the phenomenons and a lot is left ambiguous and unclear. As said earlier, no mercy is given to the viewer in terms of the more earthly sides of the plot either. The characters have known each other for years and have no reason to discuss their own relationships in depth. The only thing, strangely, the anime doesn't hold back on are the small, little things in life. Like the endless singing of the cicada, the ambiance of an abandoned building, the melancholy of an evening walk, or something as specific and mundane as having Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the middle of the night. Beautifully animated with a cinematography sometimes reminiscent of arthouse films, Kara no Kyoukai side-steps all your anime intuitions and makes you believe in this reality first of all and more than anything else. And when the supernatural finally does take center stage at some point and Yuki Kajiura's amazing, ethereal music comes on, it feels almost like you're experiencing it in your living room. If you're the kind of person who likes to know what they are coming to, having a nicely packaged, classifiable, well-done fill of anime, you're probably in for some discomfort. For others though, Kara no Kyoukai 1 does what all beginnings strive for: It makes you desperately yearn to get to know more about this strange, mysterious yet believable world and its characters. No more, no less.

J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" despite being a novel intended for adults, in many ways laid the groundworks for the typical young adult story, where an above average intelligent teen tells about their life and problems, in a very self-conscious, humorously wanna-be literate way. Examples range from the now aging Adrian Mole books, to mostly anything by John Green, and the recent British film "Submarine". Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei, or Tatami Galaxy, is also a rendition of this trope, though seemingly with a pinch of some hallucinogenic drug.

The never named main character's story of university level loneliness, as it happens, is told with ... abnormally badly drawn characters, weird color use and bits of live action. Which might have been interesting under some circumstances, but only comes across as obnoxious combined with the vapid story carrying it all. Already from the first episode it's quite clear how Tatami Galaxy is going to end. The main character yearns for some imagined, idealized version of his university days while ignoring the attractive, very cool girl who is obviously into him, and depreciating the friends he does have. In other words, not something unhappy people can actually relate to, but an excuse for pretty much 10 episodes of the main character trying out different social environments, before he finally realizes his own stupidity. Of course, perhaps I'm wrong in taking it seriously, and all this might instead be an excuse for fun, but the humor is very repetitive. Not only because it's mostly the main character's constant, manic narration which really stops being amusing after an episode, never being particularly funny in the first place, but also because most of the silly situations and their two-dimensional characters are repeated in different ways, often leaving little room in each short episode for new things. Perhaps this is the reason it takes the main character so long to see the truth of his situation.

There is a single word, I believe, which describes this anime perfectly, and sufficiently, though I'm a bit reluctant to use it because a lot of people tend to bring it up whenever something is ambitious at all. This is fairly ungood, because I love animes, or pieces of any kind of media that try to do something out of the ordinary. Tatami Galaxy on the other hand, truly is "pretentious". With its fancy animation, aimless literary references, crazy symbolism, purposeful yet irritating repetitions, and what have you, it certainly presumes a lot about itself, wants to be seen as different and smart, only to end the banal way it was obvious it would from the beginning, having done nothing sensible in the meantime. Tatami Galaxy is truly a case of much style and no substance.

In Elfen Lied's infamous first 10 minutes or so, where a naked girl escapes some kind of laboratory while telekinetically ripping apart the guards, blood gushing, we have a little side story with a secretary going on. In my view, she says a lot about Elfen Lied. This secretary is extremely clumsy. She drops coffee trays and fails to complete the simplest tasks. Before the escape is over, her head has been ripped off and her body used as a human shield. In other words, her whole, entire character, and the nature of it, exists solely to make things as shocking as possible. Nevermind the ... realism of such a person being hired to work at a laboratory such as the one in question, it's better she be as innocent as possible, and let's be really blatant about it! What could have been an artistic piece of violence in a show that otherwise, for that matter, dares go where few other animes do, becomes a self-consciously shocking scene that is either laughing along with or at the outraged viewer. By the end of the show, most of the characters are revealed to be not much different from the secretary. They are all in some or another way similarly often self-consciously in this way outrageous.

What's strange is that this self-irony is combined with some genuinely touching drama, told with occasional artistic flare. The imagery of Gustav Klimt is played with and the central character of Lucy/Nyuu is very cool. It's almost fascinating how our sympathy for her never wavers, despite the fact that the reasons this show is sometimes referenced as horror, mostly comes from her actions. Sadly the story otherwise shows little subtlety: Once the big emotional moments are out of the way, the principal plot is actually literally left unexplained at the end of the last episode.

In sum it's a very strange anime. Sometimes playing on the most subtle strings, other times making fun of itself, or even being in hypocritical in using for entertainment the things it criticizes. Sometimes being cute, and warm, other times being wildly violent. All this might make it worth watching it for itself. It is a novelty, no doubt about it. But otherwise, the story is not well-told, or even finished at all, while the characters feel too much like toys of the creators for cheap shocks, and emotional moments, for one to take them too seriously. Seen as a conventional anime then, Elfen Lied mostly fails. It is horribly curious though.

Previous to watching this, I had seen the famous Ghost in the Shell film from the 90s, as well as its sequel, several times. Not because I liked them though. Rather, due to my lack of willingness to accept that I truly did not like a lauded combination of philosophy, anime and cyberpunk; three things which I'm very fond of. It didn't make any sense. Despite some interesting, and obviously influential visuals, as well as some nice actions scenes, it seemed to me too much like the worst of European art films. It was unnecessarily slowly paced, and constantly making meaningless references to literature and ... philosophy which it went nowhere with. Stand-Alone Complex has been criticized for not being as deep as the movies. I would argue the opposite. It's not as shallow.

For the most part, what makes the show work is the same which made the films appealing: Stylish action, subtle world-building, as well as a melancholic, mysterious atmosphere. With the pace higher and the name-dropping gone, the only 20 minute episodes make these elements come across even sharper. The action is more evenly spread out. And with so little time to spare to get through all the twists and turns of each story, the explanation of all the strange technology gets even more brief, treating you almost as if you were a contemporary of the characters, somehow making it all feel so much more real. Finally, with nearly one tragedy of the near future per episode, the melancholic mystery seems to become so much stronger: Part awe over how far we've come, and part sadness over how fruitless it all seems, the universe of Ghost in the Shell becomes strangely poetic, well-helped by Yoko Kanno's legendary soundtrack.

Even the distanced, cold main characters come to show their worth by the end of the show, where the last few episodes, ending the plot surrounding the main antagonist The Laughing Man, serve to make you feel just how much you've grown to care about them. The aforementioned antagonist actually managed to partly predict the now famous "Anonymous" Internet phenomenon, if not inspire it. Apparently The Laughing Man's logo has been used by people acting together under the name of "Anonymous". To make a reference more in the spirit of the movies, the sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that what makes social science different from natural sciences is that its field of study is changed by its discoveries. Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex is not a work of social science though. On the other hand, it's undoubtedly smart, quality anime which dares to be difficult, but never is obnoxious.

Apparently, when originally airing on television, Welcome to the NHK was shown in the earliest hours of morning, the idea being that the only people awake at this time would be real hikikomori, a mostly Japanese phenomenon where usually unemployed men never leave their house, typically surviving on food brought to their door by their parents, or by once in a rare while going out to get their essentials with unemployment money. The main character of Welcome to the NHK is one of these, or at least for the first half of the first episode or so. Locked up in his room he experiences ... hallucinations about NHK, Japanese state television, brainwashing its population into becoming hikikomori, the theory inspired by the ideas of a mentally ill, older girl he spent his high school days with, playing cards together, never becoming romantically involved despite obvious tension between them.

Shortly, things start to change when he accidentally opens the door for a cute girl who decides to help the main character become normal through the way of bizarre lectures in the park outside his apartment building. Soon he also discovers the irritating music coming from the neighboring apartment is being played by someone the main character in high school tried to rescue from bullying to impress his deranged upperclassman girl. Soon the three are roaming the outsides, even running into the girl from high school, everything from suicide pacts to pyramid schemes being explored. As the show goes on, the conspiracy theories come to represent the bad sides of life we must all find some way to bear with. Conspiracies are everywhere, is my interpretation, and help lies in making your own conspiracies with people you can trust against the conspiracies that would otherwise harm you. Friends are a good thing, basically.

In this sense, MyAnimeList is such a conspiracy. People tell each other about animes, warning each other about the bad ones, recommending good ones. For this reason, I wish to spend the rest of this review warning you of the core conspiracy of Welcome to the NHK instead of for example telling you about the generally fine animation, if one can overlook the occasional drops in quality in certain episode, or acceptable audio. This is the conspiracy: For most of the time the show treats the concerns of lost, young people satirically. Even the set-up of the show, with a girl whose only problems are adorable (the manic pixie dream girl) going out of her way to rescue the introverted, lonely main character, is a play on the same kind of stories the show makes fun of, even by having the main characters try to make a computer game with such unrealistic romances.

By making fun of these things, and referencing the difficulties of the real world, the show makes you feel like it's better, more realistic and somehow different from such media. The big conspiracy being that when it all wraps up in the end, you don't even notice that is has played the exact same tricks on you that such stories do: It has let you escape to a world where things are much better than they actually are in the real world for a moment. I mean, at the end of the day, it's still the story about a young, lonely man being pursued by a dream girl. The big question then is whether you believe a good anime achieves some mystical, essential quality when it manages not to make any mistakes, or whether you're able to enjoy a good trick of cards played on you. I'm a cynic, personally. I loved Welcome to the NHK and my only related sorrow is that I'm out of episodes.

One way to put my confusion about Clannad is that it's either the most cynical, or pure-hearted anime I can ever remember seeing, and I have equally reacted to both of these ways of viewing it, like going back and forth between the duck and the rabbit in the famous optical illusion. "Clannad" apparently means family in Irish, which according to the show seems to be what ultimately makes life great, but the main character's "clannad" consists of a bunch of girls who are all in love with him and a friend that's mostly there so the girls actually have a choice. And they do ... not choose him, rather he is the target of most of the show's jokes. Ironically, considering the main theme, the only social depiction even close to being realistic is the one of the relationship between the main character and his drunkard father who once hurt him so gravely that he can't lift his arm over his shoulder anymore, which fits so badly in with the rest, and is so little explored, one must assume it solely exists to make the character in his otherwise all-too-fortunate situation possible to relate to for viewers familiar with reality.

And this is just one of many parts of Clannad that suggests some very meticulous engineering on behalf of the creators to appeal to young, lonely men. Perhaps it's no coincidence the writer of the visual novel the anime is based on is originally educated as a psychologist. One seeming example of his skills put to use is that every single girl in the show acts like a vulnerable, socially stunted child in some way, and the main character even has to teach several of them the basics of social interaction throughout. Just the kind of girls someone who finds three-dimensional girls threatening would be delighted to meet, in other words. Which is no criticism of anyone's social abilities, but rather of the cheap tricks Clannad uses in its attempts to get under your skin. Another example are the supernatural elements. Magical realism is one of my favorite tropes in fiction, but in Clannad it seems to serve no other purpose than to allow the easy creation of unreasonably pathetic and tragic backgrounds for the girls.

Despite Clannad's eagerness to manipulate, its bland-looking school hallways and classrooms, as well as characters that look so similar to each other I had problems differentiating many of them for the first half of the show, all accompanied by a repetitive, tacky soundtrack that seems taken straight out of a hotel elevator ... Well, sometimes Clannad manages to be genuinely touching. Mind you, not even as close to as often as it wants to be, but in particular in the later episodes. It's also very funny at times. I don't really laugh when I watch stuff, but a running gag where the usually serious main character fools the other characters by saying outrageous things with a straight face, often pushed me. And in interviews the writer of the visual novels seems very sincere about his work. So what is really Clannad? Manipulative and hypocritical? Or very sappy, but occasionally moving and often fun? Probably all these things, but in total not very good.

Perhaps what more than anything characterizes Attack on Titan is the same which characterizes the eponymous villains as opposed to ordinary humans, namely overabundances. There are so many promising concepts, mysteries, interesting characters, so much excellent music and well-done action. Yet even so, at the end of this first part of the story, one doesn't feel quite satisfied. Many shows complete their stories after 25 episodes, but at the end of Attack on Titan we don't really know anything more about what is going on than we did seeing the main character and his sister in the beginning, as children, awing over the part of ... the military they would join as grown-ups. New questions are being raised up until the very end of the last episode, while few previous are resolved, and thus it's difficult to see it all as anything but a beginning.

It's an outstanding beginning though. The animation occasionally suffers too much from cost-reducing stills, but the 19th century-looking world of Attack on Titan is vividly brought out, and the visuals particularly impressively manage to make the many characters easy both to remember and love. The powerful soundtrack also deserves special mention, even if the opening and ending songs of the second half of the show do not stand up to the ones of the first half, but I guess that's just an excuse to skip them and get along with the story quicker.

In a way, it's pretty silly. Humankind lives behind colossal, dam-like walls after giants began attacking them, and it's up to young, attractive, but all very idiosyncratic people dressed in dark green raincoats, carrying something like steampunk jetpacks, to hit the giants not necessarily stopped by the wall at the back of their necks, their only weak spots. What makes the story gripping, aside from the many awe-inducing action scenes the plot justifies, is some of the ingenious ways the concept is put to use to create rather original situations, but just as much the meticulousness of the plot's execution. Few proper war films manage to even get close to the dread Attack on Titan associates with the giants after only a single episode, partly in thanks to the almost surreal ridiculousness of their appearance, but also by the willingness to confront the characters fully with the brutality of conflict, among other things by unexpected killings. Yet it's perhaps a six-episode arc of the series, taking place entirely on the move, that manages to impress the most in terms of construction. All these things make it easy to forgive the occasional outrageous plot manoeuvres done to keep the show's pace as high as it is.

In the end though, it's hard to say what to make of Attack on Titan. At this point it's not even quite completely obvious what it is. While the show's mysteries and characters are probably its most interesting aspects, the focus on action of the last episode makes one wonder whether perhaps it's really first and foremostly about this. Then again, maybe the plot cash-outs are being saved for the upcoming movie. What's in any case quite clear about Attack on Titan is that it's a fresh breath of air in the shonen genre with a promising future hard not to look forward to.

Good art, and songs don't help much when the 90 minutes or so the movie lasts are bursting by the seams from characters working so hard to remind us of their primary personality traits they seem like caricatures of themselves, and everyone's favorite running gags sometimes seeming to barely have time to be finished in their most basic forms before another one is brought up, perhaps in order not to disappoint anyone. The plot is not much but an afterthought, a new strange consequence of the trouble in the show thought up to give Kurisu some time in Okabe's well-covered original plight. The high points ... are two great emotional moments, one having to do with Okabe's willingness to sacrifice himself the way he would not let the characters in the original show, which makes for a great monologue, and another with Okabe's teens, which covers territory we've seen before, barely adding anything new, and definitely nothing of substance, but is nonetheless sweet. Of course, the time-travelling still absolutely makes no sense. Example: A character travels back into the past to warn another character about going back to the past because of the consequences small changes can have over a long period of time. Something seem wrong to you about this? The worst sin the movie commits though, is that they could make a second season if they wanted now, and having seen the movie or not would not change a single thing for the viewer. Everything is exactly as it was when the show ended, none of resolutions one might have missed in the original show finally given. The movie is a fair reminiscence, but little else.

I almost feel bad not liking this anime as much as most people do, since everyone seems so passionate about it, but as an avid fan of science-fiction, I have to say this show's treatment of time-travel is a complete mess. There are so many contradictions, so many wild misunderstandings of real life ideas, and so many moments where I felt like saying, "But hold on a second, why can't you just ...," that I eventually gave up keeping track of the faults, and just pretended like the decisions the characters had to make, and the things they did made sense, and let the emotions ... of the show carry me. Because this is truly where it shines. The chemistry between the characters is excellent and it's a pure joy to be in their midst for the while it lasts. So I wonder if by criticizing the sci-fi for its lack of coherence, I'm in a way not taking Steins;Gate for what it is. This is after all a show where CERN is an evil organization creating black holes with the LHC in order to make all of time a communist utopia, and the transfer of huge amounts of data through text messages can be explained by hacking into the LHC and compressing the data using a black hole, which is as absurdly hilarious as it is mysterious.

Even taking it mainly for its characters though, there are some issues, particularly in pacing. The first episode is very confusing, and it doesn't help that the crazy concepts abruptly being introduced come side-by-side with the main character being himself, who for the first half of the show as a joke keeps insisting to everyone he is a mad scientist and talks about paranoid theories he doesn't actually believe. One is left not even sure what to take seriously as for someone unfamiliar with the show, time-travelling is no more believable than conspiracy theories are. After this confusing first episode it then takes about five more before the plot is even established, the ones before mainly being used to set up the characters, and only in episode 13 does the show actually get properly serious. This structure makes sense when one considers the anime is based on a visual novel, and in a way it's admirable that they are seemingly truthful to it, but it does not make for good pacing for an anime. It's too unbalanced. Other than all that, the darkish visuals, and the music do what they are supposed to do.

Concluding, I would call Steins;Gate a fairly above average time-travelling thriller, but mainly for its amusing characters.