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4 episodes in and Dragon Ball Daima is simply the best thing to happen to this franchise since Battle of Gods. I've been a huge fan of the series since 1998, so I know my Dragon Ball. We were all absolutely devastated to hear of Toriyama sensei's passing, so I'm very glad that this series can serve as the sendoff that he deserved. He entertained me every week when I was a dumb little kid. He entertained millions of us all around the world. Now I can watch this with my little nephews and see their eyes light up as they experience the fun of ... Dragon Ball for the first time.

I'm not sure exactly where to start, so let's look at the plot. Essentially, Daima is Toriyama's attempt to fix the disaster that was Dragon Ball GT. This was a bold idea and one that nobody saw coming. We all assumed that DB Super would continue and wrap up the Moro Arc and Granolah, and Black Freeza. I'm honestly so freaking glad it didn't. Toyotaro seems like a nice guy, and I have nothing against the man personally, but most of Super just felt like bad fanfiction from the early 2000s. In fact, there was an old fan comic about a HUGE tournament for the fate of the multiverse that was very much like the Tournament of Power, only better written. Fucking Jiren. You know a character is bad when even a Patrick Seitz performance can't save him. This is the man who threw his back out carrying Hetalia into cultural relevance! Then the Goku Black Arc just masterfully captured everything wrong with Super. You have awful writing that's so riddled with plot holes that it's horrendous even by fanfiction standards. You have "fanservice" moments that exist only to make the audience think of specific cool moments from DBZ. I hate to bring out the term "member berry" but SO much of Super was just that. You have vertical power creep simply for the sake of it combined with asspulls like Future Trunks now being 10 million times stronger than Majin Buu because he channeled the small amount of ki that was left on an almost entirely dead planet. Super had a very particular idea of what DB fans want to see. They assumed that we want new transformations, stronger powers, and ever greater threats. There is indeed a small group of DB fans who do want that shit. They want DB to be the journey of Goku becoming the strongest character in the history of fiction. They jizz themselves at the thought of Super Ultra Instinct SSJ Lvl 8 in which Goku punches out Yog Sothoth and solos the reality transcending Elder Gods that exist outside the multiverse. That's really not what I want out of DB, largely because that's not the kind of thing Toriyama was good at writing. His talent didn't lie in creating the most insanely OP characters ever conceived. He was a gag mangaka who wrote Dr Slump. He was essentially a modern-day clown or traveling performer who entertained children with ridiculous stories and silly jokes about poop on a stick. His editors were constantly trying to force him to be more serious and write what we now consider "battle shonen" but it was never actually his strong suit. Daima completely allows Toriyama to be Toriyama. It's a smaller scale story with a childlike sense of adventure and funny gags.

Next, I want to look at the animation. I'm speechless. I can't believe this is Toei! DB Super at least half the time looked SO bad it was getting memed on every week. Characters would never stay on-model. The animation in the first 2 Arcs would sometimes drop to about 3 frames per second. It was embarrassingly bad. Toriyama himself had to call Toei and personally complain about how fucking atrocious it was! Daima on the other hand looks outstanding. I know the first 4 episodes are being strung together to get a theatrical release, which is probably why they look "movie quality". I could be proven wrong, but I don't think there's any way that Toei can afford to keep up this level of quality.

The new OP fucking SLAPS! I don't have anything else for this paragraph. I just wanted y'all to know.

We are introduced to several new characters in Daima. None of them are stronger than Majin Buu in raw power...and that's perfectly fine! Gomah of course feels a bit like Pilaf, but he's not just a complete rip-off. He brings his own style of goofy humor. Toriyama is able to do some actual world building and lore expansion. I'm actually interested to find more about the Supreme Kai's brother. I want to know more about the Demon World and its inhabitants. There's finally a sense of wonder and adventure again. It's finally free from the curse of "New strong guy shows up who is way stronger than the last strong guy and now Goku must get even stronger than the new guy and beat him up." I've laughed at least once in each of the first 4 episodes. Every episode so far is oozing with charm. I've seen some people complain that Daima is sanitized compared to the original Dragon Ball and this is true to a degree. However, Toriyama was a grandfather when he wrote this. Of course, he's not going to write the exact same way he wrote when he was in his 20s. Young Toriyama made sexual assault into a running gag, not because he was edgy but because he himself was always a bit childish. He wasn't at a point where he was mature enough to think "is this appropriate?" or "would I want my kids to read this?". He just wrote down whatever gags he personally found funny. This was also the 1980s in which nobody outside of Japan was reading manga and manga comedy was still absolutely dominated by the legacy of Go Nagai. Naked superheroines grinding their vagina into bad guys' faces until they pass out. A wealthy teenage girl with huge muscles forcing her young male butler to hold up a container while she pisses gallons into it and laughs at him for being embarrassed about the whole situation. Hitler reveals he became a genocidal dictator solely because he was being cucked by shredded, Chad Rabbis. THAT Go Nagai. It was a time of very little censorship or editorial oversight in which one absolute MAD MAN wrote literally whatever he fucking wanted and that set the bar for manga comedy. We no longer live in the 1980s and we can't expect manga humor to be exactly the same as it was then.

Daima is creative, charming, shockingly competent, reverses the worst errors that Super made, and is just a good time. In the era of JJK and Chainsaw Man, I never expected DB of all franchises to come back and challenge for the Shonen title belt, but here we are. Go watch Daima. That is all.

My Wife has No Emotion is a series that I watched at the behest of an offline buddy who has always fancied himself as somewhat of a contrarian. He goes out of his way to avoid watching anything popular or anything that anyone in his social group recommends to him. Instead, he searches for hidden gems that aren’t well liked but that he can try find his own value in as opposed to trying to appreciate masterpieces based on what other people have said about them. “An ounce of my own wit is worth more to me than a ton of knowledge that comes from ... others”. This quote actually comes from the narrator’s father in the novel Tristram Shandy but could easily be something my longtime friend would say. Anyways, this anime is much like the man who recommended it to me in that it’s difficult to easily categorize and also really frustrating at times.

My Wife has no Emotion is the story of a 24-year-old virgin male who slaves away at a shitty office job and doesn’t have the time to really bother with dating. Even if he tried to make time, he’s socially awkward and in the bottom 20% of the social pecking order. He’s completely given up that he will ever find anyone. So, he decides to alleviate his crippling loneliness by ordering a gynoid robot that is programmed to cook, clean, and obey his every command. However, something odd happens with her programming and she begins to show signs that she cares for him, which causes him to fall madly in love with her and marry her. The immediate assumption that one might have based on this description is that this series is a shameless fantasy for Japanese incels in their 20s. To this I would have to respond with the cliché answer of “Yes…but also no.” In a traditional fantasy for lonely guys, the robot girl Mina would be heavily sexualized, and this would lead to a lot of spicy moments. This anime really doesn’t have a sexual element. This is entirely about some form of companionship to battle against lifelong loneliness. Mina looks like a robot, talks like a robot, and acts like a robot. She is incapable of performing sexual acts and nobody would even want her to. This is a fantasy aimed at extremely lonely guys, but nobody is going to point fingers at it and call it “gross” or “sexist”. Instead, the first half of the series is best described as just…sad. Really sad. This is a fantasy in which the answer is just to completely give up and buy yourself a ChatGPT with a vaguely female shaped body and live with a mediocre imitation of other men’s fulfilling relationships rather than having nothing. We’re not that far off from having the technology where this could be entirely feasible, and this series is here celebrating it. I don’t know how to feel about that.

This is an anime that will keep you guessing, by which I mean that it never really goes the way you think it will go. There are a number of directions that the story could take with its premise. You could have a slapstick comedy with jokes coming from the fact that she’s just a robot and it leads to hilarious misunderstandings. You could have a wholesome romance that wishes to defend non-traditional relationships by teaching the audience that not every couple needs to have kids to have meaning and value. You could create a dystopian satire that skewers Japan’s work culture and the modern dating scene in the internet age. You could create a psychological drama in which the guy sees his robot as his beautiful wife, but it’s clear to the audience and everyone else in the series that the guy is completely insane. My Wife decides to go with an odd mixture of option 1 and 2. However, it doesn’t really accomplish either very well. It doesn’t succeed as a comedy because it’s not funny. It’s never funny, even on accident. It doesn’t really accomplish the second because Mina is a robot that acts like a robot. Chobits works because Hideki and Chii have chemistry. They’re actually really cute together. Chii is an actual AI that doesn’t act like a stereotypical robot. Chobits doesn’t give a shit about the 3 Laws of Robotics or the legal ramifications of owning a robot or any of the stuff that My Wife goes into detail with. That’s because Chobits is largely using human x robot relations as a metaphor for something else. Something that would have been a little controversial to outright celebrate in a 2002 anime airing on Japanese television. Japan was culturally at different place in 2002, where even the Utena manga had the cut down on the gayness since one of the illustrators was deeply disgusted by homosexuality and threatened to leave the project if Ikuhara insisted on making Utena lesbian. I went WAY off topic, where was I? Ah yes, back to My wife. My Wife really does want to be about human x robot relations, and make it wholesome, and celebrate it as an alternative to being a forever alone loser. I honestly don’t think it succeeds very well in this.

In the second half of the series, Mina buys a medical robot to take Takuma’s temperature and keep him healthy while she’s getting some upgrades at the factory. Due to a plot convenient programming error, his factory set personality is deleted and his AI learning picks up habits and characteristics of both Takuma and Mina, making this weird little bird robot their “son”. The little bastard looks and sounds like this toy called “Gotta Go Flamingo”…and yet he’s the best part of this show. Mina’s jealousy and resentment towards her “son” Mamoru offers the first bits of character drama and development in this mess. This was a show entirely without conflict or drama of any kind, so this is very welcome. The little shit is also pretty cute, which allows My Wife to actually hit some of those wholesome scenes that it’s been wildly missing up to this point. In the climax of the series, Takuma presents his wife and son to his parents. You would think that they’d be deeply disappointed which leads to a big confrontation for the finale. Nope! They are maybe just a little disappointed, but they had no hopes for the lad anyways and this is better than nothing. Um…cool? There is actually a pretty well-done scene where Takuma is talking to his father and his dad tells him that not everyone needs to have biological children to be loved and accepted. He tells Takuma that he needs to stop worrying so much about what others think and focus on living his own best life. I must give credit where it’s due to My Wife for the fact that its last episode was easily its best. It went out swinging and I have to respect that! It was sadly too little too late to save the series from a 4 rating, but it actually tried when I thought it was just going to rest on its haunches.

My Wife Has no Emotion is one of the odder entries of the season. It’s not a great anime I would recommend to people, but it’s not just pure trash. It’s certainly wish fulfillment for lonely men, but not like you would expect. It made me think and question things, but this is far from being an artsy or philosophical series. This was made by Tezuka Productions and some talented people worked on this, but most of the time it doesn’t really live up to its pedigree in the visuals department. Both the OP and ED are quite catchy as if someone really had faith in this production, but based on its visuals I don’t think it was a high budget project for Tezuka Productions. The manga this series is based on isn’t very popular or critically acclaimed on either side of the Pacific, so I’m not entirely sure how this even got made. Not only did it get made, but it aired on Japanese television on the same mainstream channel that aired all the JoJo anime and Attack on Titan! It’s puzzling, it’s bizarre, it’s…kind of meh. I’d probably just skip this one if I were you.

This is my 10th year anniversary re-review! Back in 2014, I joined MAL to communicate with other anime fans and to write short, comedic reviews as a means to vent stress. I was attending medical school at the time and during practical exams you must think fast and write fast, so writing 30-minute blitz reviews was good writing practice for me. One of the first anime that I ever reviewed for this site was Angel Cop. Since the 1990s, Angel Cop has had an infamous reputation among older anime fans. This is due to its astoundingly awful dub and for embodying the spirit of ultra-violent, ... schlock OVAs from the height of the video rental boom in Japan. Flash forward 10 years and I’ve ended up on a completely different career path. Fortunately, I found something that I really love doing and it just so happens that I have a job where I can typically relax on the weekends. This means that I now have more than 30 minutes when I want to write a new review. It’s definitely going to take a wee bit longer than that to adequately summarize my feelings towards this anime and provide background information explaining it. Angel Cop is very much a product of its time and it’s important to understand the context in which it was made to fully appreciate this lump of insanity. Strap yourselves in folks, if you’ve not heard of this anime then you’re in for a ride!

I’m not even sure where to begin with this series. I’m someone who passionately loves terrible anime, so Angel Cop is special to me. I own it on Bluray and I’ve seen it 6 times now. I’ve watched it 3 times dubbed, twice with the original uncensored subs, and once with both the dub and subs at the same time so I could directly compare the two. There are plenty of anime where I initially disliked it either because I was in a foul mood, or I didn’t really appreciate what it was trying to do. Then I watch it again a few years later and it’s amazing. This list includes shows like Kuchuu Buranko, Samurai Champloo, Gurren Lagann, Princess Tutu, Kaiji, Evangelion, and Lain. Angel Cop is not on this list. This anime is still terrible no matter how many times I rewatch it. However, it is compellingly terrible in a way that I feel I must share with others. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore!

Angel Cop was not based on a manga, novel or anything else. It was a completely original IP created by legendary animator Ichiro Itano, who you may remember for creating the “Itano Missile Circus”. That thing in every mecha anime where a thousand missiles are fired at once and spiral all over the place. Trust me, you’ve seen it before. Angel Cop had a very troubled production history. It began in 1989 and didn’t finish until 1994 despite only being 6 episodes long. The manga that was supposed to accompany the OVA got canned after a single volume in 1989. Veteran script writer Sho Aikawa was originally attached to the project but left after the first couple episodes. Yasuomi Umetsu, who would go on to found Studio Arms, was the key animator on episode 1 but also bailed. The last 3 episodes were written, directed, and mostly animated entirely by Itano with everyone else of note having abandoned the project. Angel Cop began its life as a Judge Dredd inspired gorefest that’s violent, gritty, and consistently mean-spirited and nasty. Sort of a love letter to the schlockiest of bad 80s action movies. Bakemonogatari gets endlessly praised online for lifting shots directly from French New Wave films like “Breathless” and Cleo from 5 to 7”. Angel Cop directly lifts a scene from "Invasion USA" by Cannon Films. It’s the shot where Angel casually looks over her shoulder while firing a missile from the back of her motorcycle. It’s kind of ironic as you’ll later realize that Angel Cop would shamelessly rip-off an Israeli action film, but Itano did it for whatever reason.

Everything changed for Angel Cop from its writing to its production cycle with the Japanese economic crash that started in late 1990 and continued throughout the 90s decade. A lot of people lost a lot of money, including Mr. Itano himself. Whenever unforeseen disaster strikes, everyone looks to place the blame on someone. In reality, it was a complex issue caused by decades of monetary easing by the Japanese government and reckless speculation by Japanese banks and credit companies who thought the good times would never end. However, conspiracy authors were quick to blame the United States for sabotaging the Japanese economy in order to prevent Japan from overtaking America. Anti-Semitic conspiracy novels including the 9001st reprinting of Protocols of the Elders of Zion quickly reached the top of the Japanese bestseller list. So, if you’re wondering why the animation quality nosedives in the 2nd half and the plot goes completely off the rails to instead focus on delivering a 7-minute racist diatribe…that’s why. Itano was not exactly in a healthy mental space during the last half of this OVA. Dude was hauled up in an animation studio with empty bottles of whiskey, piss jars, and Protocols finishing this piece of shit mostly out of pure spite. You have to love the crazy old bastard. Against all the odds, he somehow got this shit made.

Angel Cop was not a successful OVA in Japan by any means. So how did it even reach the West? Why isn’t it stuck on Japanese VHS and doomed to utmost obscurity? The answer to those questions is a little company called Manga UK. During the 1990s, the British saw an opportunity to market anime as violent, sexy cartoons for adults. They would license the cheapest, shittiest OVAs that no Japanese companies wanted and sell them to British audiences with highly “spiced up” scripts that feature swear words in virtually every sentence. Enter John Wolskel, who is secretly the hero of this whole story. As a young college graduate, Wolskel was trying to break into television and film writing. Some of his first projects were for Manga UK. After the disastrous failures of “The Dark Myth” and “Sword for Truth”, his boss threatened to fire him if the next anime he was assigned to didn’t fly off the shelves. Wolskel stopped even remotely trying to follow the Japanese scripts and completely threw caution to the wind. This led to such AMAZING dubs as Mad Bull 34, Devil Man, Cyber City Oedo, and of course Angel Cop. Wolskel’s script manages to transform Angel Cop into a profanity laden dark comedy in which an elite team of utterly unlikeable asshole cops must crush a plot by American communists. Oddly enough, the joke dub even manages to fix some plot holes from the original, such as the Japanese government allowing Jews to somehow buy the entire island of Hokkaido and turn it into the world’s nuclear waste dump to sterilize the entire Japanese population. The dub explains that they don’t intend to keep this a secret for long, but the sterilization will happen quickly and by the time the rest of Japan finds out, they’ll all be on a beach overseas using new identities. The original script literally never explains what the motives of the Japanese government are to go along with this plan or how they intend to keep it hidden. They just say that if they don’t do it, the Jews will force Japan to become the 51st state, which is a fate somehow worse than sterilizing the entire population. Then it goes on a tangent about how America lost over 500,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War which was entirely orchestrated by American Jews in order to test out chemical weapons on Vietnamese civilians. Yeah…even the most unhinged of terminally online /pol/ lurkers look at the Angel Cop script and think…what?!! Anyways, back to my man John. The dude made a heroic effort to salvage this project and is the only reason that anyone outside of Japan knows about this anime.

Angel Cop’s reputation in the 90s made it out to be one of the single worst anime of all time, but is it really that bad? The answer to this is…not really. Of the scant selection of anime that Americans could purchase dubbed in 1995, it was definitely among the worst. However, America wasn’t getting the type of shit that people like Kenny Lauderdale cover. We weren’t getting Chargeman Ken, Twinkle Nora Rock Me, Kentoushi, Kennel Tokorozawa, and shit like that. I can personally list over 100 anime that are worse than Angel Cop. Ichiro Itano may not be the greatest script writer, but he’s an animation genius. Even flying solo while drunk off his ass, Itano insured that Angel Cop has a few scenes that look good even in the last couple episodes. Angel’s brutal execution of a communist terrorist in the first episode looks spectacular and is possibly the best-looking gore that Umetsu has ever done. What I can’t say anything nice about is the OST. Angel Cop’s soundtrack has never been released even in Japan and there is a good reason for this. It was composed entirely using a Casio synthesizer and just sounds like garbage. Combined with one of the worst ending themes in the history of anime, Angel Cop’s soundtrack is just the drizzling shits.

So, if I love this anime and keep making my friends and family watch it, then why am I only giving it a 2? While the dub does its absolute best, Angel Cop doesn’t work as a “so bad it’s hilarious” comedy in the way that something like Mad Bull 34 does. Angel Cop probably has around 6-7 minutes of gut busting comedy spread over a 3-hour run time. Even if you’re an edgelord and are looking for the anti-PC shock value, it doesn’t really do that consistently either. That’s pretty much all in the last 2 episodes. If you're a gorehound, you'll also be disappointed. The majority of Angel Cop’s run time is actually just boring as FUCK. My girlfriend almost fell asleep watching this. There are long gaps of utterly unenjoyable downtime between the peaks of gleeful ultra violence, hilarious dub lines, and deranged conspiracy theories. Instead of being “so bad it’s good”, Angel Cop at the end of the day is just…bad. Really fucking bad. However, it’s such a time capsule of OVA insanity that I find it endlessly fascinating. Despite my morbid fascination though, I can’t earnestly give this a higher rating.

Hiroyuki Imaishi as I've mentioned a number of times in previous reviews is a polarizing figure. He's undeniably an animation genius, but his work can be frustrating at times. The anime industry has other highly talented animators like Masaaki Yuasa, but Imaishi just might be the best in terms of frantic, chaotic energy. Everything he works on looks SO fluid and is an absolute treat for the eyes. Unfortunately, this animation genius refuses to move beyond the gross out humor of 90s American cartoons. I'm pretty sure he has a shrine to Ren and Stimpy in his house and says prayers to it each morning. ... Imagine some of the greatest animation in world being squandered for the sake of poop, booger, fart, and wiener jokes. That's the Imaishi experience and it is perfectly captured here in Dead Leaves.

I would describe my tastes as "Imaishi Adjacent". There are TONS of things that the man worked on that I love such as FLCL, Evangelion, Re:Cutie Honey, Red Line, His and Her Circumstances, FMA 03 and even Inferno Cop. However, these are all works where the man himself isn't in the director's chair and isn't the main person in charge. Gurren Lagann is considered his magnum opus, but even there you have to give a lot of credit to head writer Kazuki Nakashima. So, what happens when Imaishi is 100% in charge with no interference from anyone? What does pure, highly distilled Imaishi look like? The answer can be found in Dead Leaves. Extremely silly, gross, nihilistic, juvenile bullshit of the highest caliber. Just pure bullshit for the sake of bullshit that also happens to look gorgeous.

I could describe the entire plot of Dead Leaves and still not feel like I spoiled anything. Some random psychopaths who look like freaks happen to wake up naked with amnesia and go on a murder spree. Then they get sent to the moon where stuff happens involving tubes sucking shit out of people's asses and a drill penis that won't stop ejaculating everywhere. Some stuff does get explained later but it honestly doesn't matter. One does NOT watch Dead Leaves for the plot or characters. This one is pure visual spectacle through and though, which is why I'm glad it's only 50 minutes. Any longer and it would have worn out its welcome. However, 50 minutes keeps it entertaining and digestible.

While I've mostly focused on the negatives until now, I still mostly enjoyed this one. The humor works well for the most part. If you're in a silly mood, there are plenty of laughs to be had. The animation as I've mentioned is incredible. The character designs are also quite fun and pay homage to cartoons from all over including South Park, John K's style, The Gorillaz, and more. This is a perfect anime to watch with friends. You need to view it with someone else to share this WTF experience.

Frieren is an anime that I’ve been meaning to review for months, but I wanted to wait just a little bit for the emotions and hype to settle down. There’s a LOT to discuss when it comes to Frieren, but not all of it directly has to do with the anime itself. Firstly, I’m reviewing this on MAL and that means by necessity that I must address the elephant in the room. Frieren accomplished the unthinkable in unseating Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood from its highly controversial 15-year reign. Why was it controversial? Vote brigading my friends. It was artificially kept at number 1 by a ... highly obsessive faction of MAL users and…it’s a long story.

The first thing you need to know about MAL is that this site and its user base have always been incredibly image conscious to an obsessive and often downright comical degree. While MAL is Japanese owned, the early MAL userbase was overwhelmingly Americans and a lot of MAL’s culture was shaped by the perception of anime and anime fans in the United States in the 2000s. MAL users existed largely in isolation from the “offline anime community”. The people you meet at your local comic book shop buying battle shonen manga and monster girl ecchi or cosplaying at your local anime convention. In contrast, MAL has always aligned itself with the “Elitist” faction of the anime fandom who define themselves as the antithesis of the “weaboos” who formed the image of the Western anime fandom back in the 2000s. The weaboos were constantly getting dunked on back then and were widely perceived as pervy, horny, stupid, immature, manchildren. MAL users followed the lead of the European anime community on 4chan /a/ and desperately wished to be seen as well-cultured, sophisticated intellectuals who only appreciate a select few anime that have artistic value. With this kind of attitude and site culture being enforced, it was no surprise that Galactic Heroes rose to the top of early MAL. However, there was a problem. For there was another anime that began with a G. While the Americans and Europeans on early MAL would have been happy with Galactic Heroes staying on top, Japan and for some reason a huge chunk of the developing world happen to really, REALLY like a certain series called Gintama, which is famous for its irreverent, highly referential humor. The image obsessed elitists would be God Damned if they allowed “Japanese Family Guy” to become the highest rated anime on the site, so the first massive rating bombing and Great Fandom War began. This war threatened to tear MAL apart, but a new faction was forged in the fires of war: The Order of Brotherhood. A loosely organized group of MAL users decided in the forums that a 3rd anime should be deliberately upvoted to number 1 to keep both Galactic Heroes and Gintama from that spot. This anime should be a largely neutral, inoffensive work that presents a respectable face for the anime community but is still accessible and isn’t snobby enough to chase people away. The popular shonen Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood was chosen for this role. It would be like The Shawshank Redemption on old ass IMDB. It’s a peacekeeper title everyone basically at least likes. However, the Order of Brotherhood began to abuse their powers. Every single time a new anime briefly gained the number 1 spot, it was absolutely bombarded by 1 and 2 ratings until it was no longer a threat for the top spot. For 15 long years this happened. It got to be such a well-known meme that a youtuber asked his followers to get Interspecies Reviewers to number 1 just to mess with these guys and MAL had to completely change how it calculates ratings and how many anime you must watch before your opinion even counts. I think it’s at least 50 now. Throughout all this time, The Brotherhood firmly believed that they were keeping the peace and instilling order. Despite all their efforts, the downfall of the Brotherhood was inevitable simply because time doesn’t stop. While anime popularity in the US was in sharp decline in 2009, this is no longer the case in 2024. For most of the world, anime has never been more mainstream. Anime certainly still has a bit of a stigma in more rural parts of the US, but the image of the typical anime fan is no longer homogenous. A person’s first mental image of “anime fan” is just as likely to conjure up a famous athlete, rapper, or social media personality as it is the images in Filthy Frank’s “Weaboo Song”. If the anime fandom doesn’t have a huge image problem, there is no need for self-loathing, hyper self-conscious anime fans to gatekeep everything and bully others to try preventing the entire community from being bullied. Another factor is that the percentage of active MAL users who are American has dropped substantially over the last 15 years. The Brotherhood was and still is overwhelmingly composed of American users obsessed with image and “elitist vs weaboo” bullshit from a million years ago that doesn’t even apply to the anime experience and history of countries like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, China, Indonesia, etc. Random anime like Oshi no Ko were sneaking to number 1 more and more often and the effort it took to ratings nuke these newcomers back out of the top 50 kept increasing. Frieren just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So…is Frieren actually the best anime of all time? Personally, I would say no. Not even close. However, there is some substance behind the hype. There is a reason the Frieren was able to unite the terminally online with offline casuals, liberals with conservatives, male viewers and female viewers, and Japanese otaku with the rest of the world. Frieren has many aspects that it does remarkably well. Before we even talk about the characters and plot and all that stuff, let’s look at some of the technical aspects. Frieren is a GORGEOUS anime that represents a triumphant return for Studio Madhouse as the king of quality anime. A title which had been slipping from them over the last few years. Frieren is also the 2nd mega hit in a row for young director Keiichirou Saitoh following up on his incredibly well received debut: Bocchi the Rock. He is only 31 years old and is now one of the most in-demand directors in the entire anime industry! Every scene in Frieren is not only visually appealing and directed in a way that squeezes every bit of emotion it can get from the source material, but it also has the confidence to pace itself as if it’s going to run for 6 seasons. Even though that’s far from guaranteed in the anime industry. Fortunately for Frieren, its Japanese merchandise and figurine sales are quite strong and further seasons seem like a safe bet. It is always tragic when you get a Promised Neverland situation where the director poured their heart out and they either get cut off completely or given WAY too few episodes to wrap up the story all because Japanese consumers didn’t buy enough dakimakura and didn’t care as much as the gaijin so the studio fucks it over! Frieren’s soundtrack was outsourced to an American composer named Evan Call and it sounds much closer to a Hollywood mega film than a shonen anime. Have you ever actually bought an anime soundtrack? There’s the main theme, the battle theme, and a few main character themes that you can instantly recognize and are REALLY good compositions. Then you get to the comic relief scenes and it’s like listening to a cat walking on a synthesizer and farting up a storm. Kaoru Wada is especially guilty of this. The Inuyasha soundtrack for example has some BEAUTIFUL tracks and then some of the worst auditory vomit you’ve ever heard in your fucking life. The vast majority of anime soundtracks have always been like this. There are one in a million exceptions like Cowboy Bebop, but music was a major theme of that anime. You’re not going to get a seasonal fantasy anime where the OST sounds like the LOTR movies and every single track in every single scene is good. However, Frieren is actually able to accomplish just that!

So Frieren is gorgeous, has an amazing OST, and is super well directed. So what? How is the world building? This is a shonen that deals with magic, so how is the magic system? This is once again an area where Frieren triumphs. Frieren is very happy to take a pause and explain minor aspects of its world and history but never in a way that bores the viewer. It gives enough details to keep us engaged but there is still a LOT that we want to learn. As for the battle system, some characters in Frieren have a higher base level of mana and can cast bigger and flashier spells, but it avoids the vertical power scaling pitfalls of previous shonen titles. Frieren is very strong, but she’s not invincible. Someone with a lower level of overall mana but the right spell at the right time could easily kill Frieren. This isn’t a series where strategy just goes out the window and it’s all about who has a bigger number. Frieren also manages to avoid one of the huge traps of bad fantasy writing where one spell is SO much better than anything else, that it ruins the magic system and makes everything else essentially irrelevant, so all battles end up looking the exact same. Stuff like fireball in the original D&D, Balefire in Wheel of Time or the Avada Kedavra in Harry Potter. Frieren actually pokes fun at this while adding to its own recurring theme about the passage of time. You have this super arrogant demon who has been frozen in stone for 50 years. He developed this killing curse that’s similar in essence to the Avada and he absolutely decimated the wizard population of 50 years ago so temporarily sealing him was the best they could do. He gets utterly humbled by an apprentice mage because his world beating spell became the new standard by which all offensive magic is judged and all defensive magic was developed against, so after 50 years it’s very average instead of remarkable. This tends to be how real-life weapon advances work and describes the relationship between armor and weapons development.

In terms of characters, Frieren once again does a good job. The anime hops back and forth through time between the current day, Frieren’s adventure party from over 50 years ago, and Frieren’s time with her teacher around 1000 years ago. In each time period, we see little ways in which Frieren has developed as a character and been impacted by those around her that she grows to care about. While Frieren gets the most development and character investment, Fern, Stark, and others are also allowed plenty of room to grow. Having said this, Frieren is still a shonen and once you reach the first tournament arc…yes course there’s a fucking tournament arc…you do get some characters that are less impressive. For example, we get this grumpy, middle aged bastard named Richter who not only is willing to kill 2 teenage girls to pass his wizard exam, but he goes out of his way against the orders of his superior to try do so and seems to revel in it. Then this sadistic and murderous aspect of his personality is just kind of dropped and is never mentioned again. Another wizard is a murderous psychopath, but this is largely played off as a joke and her personality never really evolves much beyond “lol, what a psycho bitch!” The demons are also kind of boring and shitty antagonists, but they’ll get their paragraph later. Don’t you worry!

Frieren is a shonen in terms of its core demographic and it uses several of the familiar trappings of popular shonen manga, but also a deliberately slower pacing in order to place just as much focus on its themes as it places on kickass fights. Frieren at the end of the day is a series about mortality and the bonds we form with other people. Even if we’re not immortal like Frieren, we all know a grandparent, a friend, or someone else who passed away and we would do anything to have spent more time with that person. We care deeply about the people that we love and recognize on an intellectual level that we only have a very finite, precious time to spend with those people, yet it’s still so easy to take our time on Earth for granted and neglect our personal relationships. Frieren captures a fundamental human struggle that’s both universal and powerful. When it’s at its best, Frieren is an emotionally moving series that inspires us to live our lives better and not shut ourselves in.

Sadly, we must now talk about the other controversy surrounding Frieren besides its unusually high MAL score. This controversy surrounds the demon race, who are the primary antagonists of the series. Frieren needed some kind of external conflict to add danger and keep things from getting too boring. So, the writer of the Frieren manga took the easy route and created a generically evil fantasy race that wants to wipe out or enslave all the other sentient species and must be stopped at all costs. However, this evil species isn’t like the goblins from Goblin Slayer. Those little bastards are a semi-sentient walking virus who can’t even naturally reproduce on their own without raping the females of other species and murdering the male population. They are simply a fantasy disease. Frieren’s demon race are a civilized, intelligent, fully sentient race who are simply evil and must we wiped out. Who cares? They’re literally demons, right? Well…sort of. They’re not demons in a Christian sense. They’re a naturally occurring, sentient species of humanoids with a slightly higher base level of magic who all just happen to be jerks and normal humans refer to them as demons. Unlike Warhammer demons and other Christian inspired demons, they don’t literally come from Hell. If you kill a Frieren demon, they die permanently with no afterlife. If you kill a Warhammer demon or any Christian inspired demon, they just kind of go back to Hell. The demons in Frieren have no interest in corrupting Humanity or deceiving humans into doing horrible things. They trick other species like Elves, humans, and dwarves into feeling sorry for them or giving them a chance before immediately betraying and kill them. Then the demons cry crocodile tears when they finally get what they deserve. The concept of an innately evil species that needs to be wiped out is one that fantasy has largely been trying to leave behind for about 40 years now. Tolkien is sometimes credited as the architect of this trope, but with him it comes from a very different place. Tolkien’s writing is always heavily influenced by his devout Catholicism. The orcs, trolls, and Easterlings aren’t evil because God made them that way. The God of Tolkien’s universe known as Eru Iluvatar didn’t create any being specifically to be evil, let alone an entire species. Tolkien’s equivalent of the Devil was jealous of God’s creations, so he took stuff that Iluvatar created and made his own warped mockeries of those things. However, even the Orcs in Tolkien’s belief are not entirely beyond redemption since they still retain the gift of language, which shows that part of their original souls are intact. Frieren is entirely secular in its morality and advocates a genocidal solution purely based on what seems to be rational.

“There are no women and children. Get it through your head. These are mere animals who imitate human forms. They convince the whole world to feel sorry for them and each and every time it’s just a trick so they can attack us again the moment our guard is down. The solution is obvious. We should just kill them all!”

While this quote is very close to one spoken by our favorite Elf Waifu, a quote that the series does EVERYTHING to perfectly validate her on, this isn’t actually a Frieren quote. This is a quote from some random old lady that got interviewed by CNN last month. The language that Frieren uses casually and without much thought by the mangaka is used almost word for word to advocate genocide in real life. It’s not just bad timing and bad luck that Frieren was released when it was. There is no time period where this aspect of the series’ writing would have been praiseworthy. Frieren in regards to this sub-plot engages in writing so lazy and so regressive that it stumbles into uncomfortable territory. Imagine for a second if you would that some political party in some country was actively planning a campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing. However, they know that such actions are no longer seen as acceptable in any circumstances by an overwhelming margin of society. So…they decided to finance an addictive and popular show that (while not being the focus of course) subtly promotes genocide in a rational light and tries to shift the thinking of young audiences. This isn’t what happened of course, I already said that Frieren’s case is one of criminal laziness. However, that show would look EXACTLY like Frieren and that’s not a good thing.

Overall, I’m giving this series an 8 for now…but it would be more accurate that I’m giving it an I for Incomplete. I think Frieren promises to be a strong franchise and has all the potential in the world if it can avoid shooting itself in the foot. However, I wouldn’t have written that lengthy previous paragraph if Frieren was safe from monumental errors of judgment. The series could very well turn out to be a disaster that I will be embarrassed that I ever enjoyed. Or it could be absolutely amazing, and we will all just kind of forget some of the less ideal aspects of S1. The future of Frieren has not yet been written. Most of my offline buddies haven’t seen Frieren and don’t want to watch Frieren. To be honest, I’ll probably hold off shoving it down their throats until I get a better grasp on which way this franchise is headed.

Pluto was my 2nd favorite anime of 2023 falling just short of Vinland Saga S2. I really love this anime, but I’m not just going to be gushing praise nonstop in this review. Pluto is a beautiful, passionate work of art that comes straight from the heart, but it also has some flaws. Of course, having flaws and imperfections doesn’t suddenly make a work of art “bad” by any means. Art is created by human beings and humans are imperfect creatures. One reason I want to have a full, honest discussion on Pluto is that the internet tends to oversimplify things. The internet and review ... culture in general doesn’t like nuance and complexity. Everything is either “OMG AMAZING!” or “THE WORST FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT EVAR!!!” Sometimes, an anime starts out being viewed as the first, then some anitubers point out some obvious flaws and then suddenly, everyone jumps on the hate train, and it becomes “that piece of shit that idiots used to think was good!”. Pluto does NOT deserve such a fate. I don’t really think it’s in too much danger, but let’s have this discussion so we can appreciate Pluto blemishes and all and talk about the context in which it was made and what it wished to accomplish.

Pluto started out as a manga by the great Naoki Urasawa in September of 2003. It is a dark, more adult oriented reimagining of the most famous arc in the original Astro Boy manga called the Greatest Robot Arc, which ran from 1964 to 1965. Pluto as a manga has 2 main objectives. The first is to bring the creative genius and warmhearted brilliance of Osamu Tezuka to a modern audience. Tezuka is incredible when he’s at his best, but he also tends to mix in some very silly gags that don’t always pair well with the more serious scenes. There’s a segment of Astro Boy that Tezuka wrote to oppose the Vietnam War where Astro/Atom fights off some very cartoonishly stereotyped American soldiers with machine guns that come out of his butt. That’s just mild Tezuka silliness. It can get WAY worse. Apart from the odd tonal issues, Tezuka could get very heavy handed at times. This is to be expected when he’s trying to preach against racism and imperialism to an audience of children in the immediate aftermath of WW2. It’s also only to be expected that some of this hasn’t aged perfectly and can at times be a little cringe inducing to a modern, adult audience. Given, most of Tezuka’s stuff has still aged better than a lot of the American comics from the 40s-60s. Well…Kimba is kind of bad, but nobody bats a thousand. Tezuka was also heavily influenced by American cartoons of the early 20th century, so he loved comedic exaggeration. This can lead to some ridiculous looking stereotypes. Anyways, Urasawa wanted to take Tezuka’s strengths and refine his work to remove the weaker aspects.

Urasawa’s other goal in writing Pluto was deeply personal and political. It was created in direct response to the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003 and can’t be separated from that context. Pluto was written in 2003 and holy shit is that obvious! Urasawa like many in Japan was horrified that Japan’s closest ally launched a bloody, pre-emptive invasion on false charges and this ally wanted Japanese troops to join the war effort in support roles. Urasawa felt helpless to stop what he was seeing on his TV and listening to on the radio every day, so Pluto was born as Urasawa’s personal protest to at least try do something to impact Japanese public opinion in whatever small way he could.

Now that we have a little background on the manga, let's talk about the anime production. Pluto the anime took over 6 years to make and was a passion project by Masao Maruyama, one of the founders of Studio Madhouse and MAPPA. Pluto looks absolutely gorgeous and Studio M2 did an incredible job bringing Urasawa’s manga to the screen. The production value is off the charts since Pluto cost over 2 million US dollars per episode. The series is 8 episodes long with each episode lasting roughly an hour and each covering 1 volume of the manga. Let’s start this review off on a positive note and cover some of the things I really liked about Pluto.

1. The characters. One of Urasawa’s greatest strengths is character writing. Specifically, he’s REALLY good at fleshing out supporting cast and side characters and making them feel like fully realized, three dimensional human beings, even when they don’t have a lot of screen time. In Tezuka’s manga, a bunch of robots are introduced and rapidly killed off and the reader has zero reason to care. Pluto is going to make you care about each and every robot in this series. In the first episode, you have this robot named North #2 who was built as a weapon of war but suffers trauma from how many of his fellow AI he’s had to kill. He wants nothing more than to abandon his role as a weapon and start a new path, but this is easier said than done with all the guilt he feels for his past actions. He ends up discovering a deep love for music and bonding with a grouchy, aging composer suffering from a creative block. I personally got more both emotionally and intellectually out of this segment than the entirety of Violet Evergarden…and it’s only half of the first episode! That’s just how good Pluto is.

2. I mentioned that the production values were sky high, but this extends even beyond the incredible animation and detailed character art. The soundtrack by Yuugo Kanno is quite potent. This is the same guy who did the OST for most of the JoJo seasons, Psycho Pass, and a number of other high-profile anime. It’s good stuff. The English dub was also a treat. Easily one of my favorite dubs that I’ve seen in years! Not only does it have some very emotional and incredible voice performances, but I love the eclectic mix of the casting. You have Funimation veterans who have been in tons of modern anime, some old school anime voice actors from Central Park Media and the early days of dubbing, and actors like Keith David who have never been in an anime before. This led to the hilariously surreal situation of listening to Keith David act across Mike Pollock. Dr. Facilier vs. Dr. Robotnik. Hollywood actor who went to Juilliard vs. guy who was so desperate for work between 2005-2015 that he starred in all the straight to DVD Brazilian mockbusters like Ratatooing.


3. Pluto is able to succeed as an anime purely through great storytelling, character psychology, and drama. It doesn’t want to glorify violence, so it goes out of its way to not actually show the fights. It doesn’t want to rely on action scenes to make the audience invested. Pluto doesn’t feel the need to insert Marvel humor to break up the serious scenes and try win over audiences the easy way. Pluto has one tone and that tone is dead fucking serious. The entire anime. No fanservice. No comedy gags. None of that. I honestly appreciate just how hard Pluto commits to this. Usually, the more money something costs the make, the more it tries to pander to the lowest common denominator. When you spend an amount of money that could result in your studio going under if it’s not a hit, you REALLY don’t want to risk alienating the average viewer. You want to play it as safely as possible, but Pluto completely resists the urge to do this.

4. Pluto is an emotionally powerful drama that also serves as a powerful anti-war anime. It’s very, VERY rare for an anime to make me tear up or almost tear up and Pluto was able to do it in just the first episode and then multiple times afterwards. That’s honestly quite impressive.

Now, let’s cover some of the issues I had with Pluto. As you’ll see in the following paragraphs, some of Pluto’s greatest strengths are also a double-edged sword.

1. Remember when I said that Pluto’s only tone was dead serious? Well…this can cause some issues when you’re adapting a very heavy-handed children’s comic from the 1960s. Like Astro Boy before it, Pluto is a work all about empathy and the dangers of what can happen when we fail to do this and demonize entire groups as “other” and “lesser”. The robots in Pluto operate as a stand in for marginalized groups within society. This can be different religions, nationalities, etc. Unlike in Astro Boy, the robots aren’t just a 1:1 metaphor for racial minorities…even though you do get a side story about a man named Adolf who joins the anti-robot KKK. They’re literally just the KKK only they hate robots. This part was taken directly from Astro Boy and yeah...it’s a little silly for a highbrow, adult work that’s taking itself 100 percent seriously. It also must be mentioned that the Iraq War metaphor throughout the anime is SO blatant that it’s hard not to laugh sometimes. There’s an old episode of The Boondocks in which the rich villain’s idiot son “W” is misled by his nefarious friend “Rummy” into robbing a gas station while lying to everyone and claiming to have a noble motive for doing this. Oh, and the gas station owner is drawn to resemble Saddam. That super obvious political allegory in Boondocks was of course played as a satirical joke. It’s hard to create a political allegory THAT obvious and take it seriously, but that’s exactly what Pluto does. In fact, Pluto is even LESS subtle than the allegory I just described!

2. Ladies and gentlemen…Dr. Teddy Roosevelt. This one character creates a number of issues. Firstly, he’s an evil supercomputer who secretly controls the US government and bosses the President around while taking the form of an adorable little teddy bear. You see, the joke is that the teddy bear is named after Teddy Roosevelt, who was a big believer in US imperialism and using bullshit charges to declare war on Spain and gain more colonies to exploit. It comes across as kind of silly and on the nose, but we’re going to take it dead seriously because It’s Pluto. Professor Abullah and Sahad/Pluto are great, well-rounded antagonists with understandable motives. The struggle between those 2 and the team of Atom and Gesicht was phenomenal. However, Urasawa wanted to have the ultimate bad guy be this embodiment of US government imperialism, so he created a character that wasn’t in the original Astro Boy arc and frankly feels a little shoehorned into this story. Dr. Teddy has nothing even approaching an understandable or complex motive. He’s just evil incarnate and wants to wipe out most of the Earth's biosphere and rule what remains forever while tormenting the survivors. This brings me to my next issue…he’s a completely shameless ripoff of AM from “I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream”. Urasawa already likes to borrow characters from classic lit and put his own spin on it. For example, Inspector Lunge from Monster was heavily inspired by Inspector Javert from Les Misrables. However, Lunge is still his own character, while Teddy is literally just AM plagiarism. There’s no getting around it. Urasawa didn’t even have a good way of actually wrapping up this sub-plot, so Teddy is killed off in VERY anti-climactic faction by a legless robot who somehow dragged himself from Europe to America in a few hours, infiltrated the White House with nobody noticing, and got past all the security to reach the deepest chamber of the White House and finish off Teddy. Who btw has no means of defense despite being a brilliant supercomputer who would logically see the benefit of building a method to protect itself.

3. Pluto was written with a very specific purpose in mind, and I completely understand that. However, as a work of art, it would probably work better if it focused on being against war, imperialism, and discrimination in general as opposed to this one very specific war. This makes Pluto feel quite dated at times and creates issues due to how blatantly it wants to be a 1:1 exact allegory. Take for example King Darius, who is clearly just Saddam Hussein and is drawn to closely resemble Saddam so you can’t see him as anyone else. It turns out that not only did he not possess WMDs, but he was actually an innocent dude who just wanted to turn Iran into a more fertile land and plant tons of flowers. Um…Urasawa-san. Saddam killed 250,000 of his own people AND launched a completely unprovoked invasion of his neighbor in 1980 that resulted in an additional 1.5 million deaths. Just because the neocons who launched the Iraq War were lying scumbags doesn’t mean that Saddam was a nice dude who just wanted to plant flowers! More than one side can be the bad guy at the same time, this isn’t pro-wrestling rules where it must be heel vs. baby face! Pluto goes so far portraying him as innocent prior to the US invasion that it almost borders on genocide denial, which isn’t a good look. Also, this is a pure nitpick, but I'll add it here. Despite Urasawa usually doing his research when it comes to portraying foreign countries, Pluto follows the Hollywood stereotype that Iran looks exactly like Saudi Arabia. In reality, Iran is only 23 percent desert while Saudi Arabia is over 95 percent desert. Iran has mountains and ski resorts. It’s NOT just a giant sandbox!

4. The last issue is that Pluto works perfectly well as an allegory. However, it makes a lot less sense when you look at the story literally. Let’s assume that cloud computing doesn’t exist in the world of Pluto and there is no way to easily backup a robot’s memories and personality on some server farm and just download it into a new body if the robot's body was destroyed. You would still think that a robot would be fine so long as their chip is undamaged. The chip could just be inserted into a different body and the robot has all its memories and personality back with a new body. However, this isn’t how it works in Pluto since it wants to have lots of tragedy and sad robot deaths. When a robot’s body is damaged, they die, and their chip can be scanned by other robots but can’t be placed in a new body. …except when it can. That’s exactly how Sahad’s chip was placed into Pluto to give him a new powerful body. It is never explained why this is the one instance where a chip transfer works. The rules of Pluto’s world building are often contradictory and nonsensical. Gesicht dies when he gets a chest wound. When a human gets shot in the chest, they bleed a lot. The loss of blood means that less blood can reach the brain, starving it of oxygen and nutrients, which causes the brain to die. How the FUCK did Gesicht die from this? He doesn’t have blood! Damaging his body should do nothing to damage his chip, which is located in his head. We know this for a fact, because it is shown to us multiple times. He died purely because the plot demanded that he die, even though it makes zero sense within the context of the story and the established rules.

Anyways, despite my frustrations with aspects of Pluto, it’s still a very good anime overall. I don’t want to accentuate the negative and spend too much time beating up on an anime that I actually love. I just wanted to address some of these issues before some nitpicking critic on Youtube does it. I don’t feel that Pluto quite matches Monster in terms of overall consistent quality, but Pluto’s highs are some of the highest you’ll find in the entire anime medium. I’m really looking forward to the anime adaptation of 20th Century Boys to get my next Urasawa fix!

Rurouni Kenshin 2023 has finally ended and most people never even knew it was airing. Despite being a reboot of a legendary franchise that was highly anticipated in Japan, very few people on MAL watched this one. Anitubers have largely gone out of their way to not talk about it. So why the ice-cold reception? You know why! If you’re a Zoomer, you probably only know Rurouni Kenshin as being “That one old anime that boomers overrated and then it turned the mangaka is…yeah…so now I’m never going to watch it or read it.” There is a LONG discussion that could be had on the ... morality of making this reboot in the first place. Personally, I wouldn’t have made this anime if I were a producer. Unless maybe a large portion of the profits go to child abuse victims or combatting human trafficking. There’s also a long discussion that we could have about the morality of pirating this anime vs watching it legally. However, I’m not going to have either of those discussions in this review. The fact is the anime did get made and I’m going to cover what I liked about it, and what I didn’t like.

Stuff I liked about the new Kenshin:

1. I think Kenshin’s new voice actor fits the character much better than his 90s actress. Kenshin is a kindhearted goofball, so they went with an actress in the 90s anime to try be sort of like Masako Nozawa’s Goku, but…I watch 90s Kenshin dubbed for a reason. It’s NOT a perfect dub either. It’s Media Blasters and I still vastly prefer it over the 90s Japanese voice acting.

2. There are some very impressive action scenes in the new Kenshin. The old Kenshin is much more stylized, and it has a charm to it for older viewers like me, but they try as hard as they can to not actually animate during the fights. You see a LOT of action lines, recycled animation, and flashes of light to represent the clanging of swords. The 90s anime is Studio Deen, which is basically all I need to say. The new Kenshin actually looks like a modern anime and will be much easier for younger anime fans to stomach.

3. Almost no filler! Do you want a highly faithful adaptation of the Kenshin manga that follows it EXTREMELY accurately almost panel for panel? This is it. There is one little filler arc, but it was pretty charming, and I had fun with it. I was also happy to see that it was a brand-new story and not a rehash of the 90s filler.

4. It’s Kenshin! I probably shouldn’t be excited for this series given my strong antipathy for Mr. Watsuki, who unlike his manga protagonist has seemingly taken zero action to redeem himself and atone for his crimes. However, I REALLY like Kenshin as a work of art. I think that its beauty, artistic impact, and being a source of inspiration for an entire generation of anime fans is something independent from its scummy author.

Things I didn’t like about the new Kenshin

1. The new OST is trash. It doesn’t help that the 90s Kenshin has my single favorite OST in ALL of anime. I’m not sure why they didn’t just use the 90s music but…who knows?

2. Manga and anime are different mediums of art. What works when you’re reading a manga and flipping pages isn’t necessarily what works best in an anime. That’s why I don’t think following the manga THIS closely is the ideal way of making a great adaptation. The 90s anime wasn’t afraid to put their own spin on things and make changes when they felt it would work better. The direction in the new anime feels timid and slavishly devoted.

3. The new character designs are very bland compared to the original. Megumi, Kaoru, and even Tsubame all look the freaking same! The character designer had an obsession with giving every character the exact same dark hair, blue eyes, and facial shape. When Sojiro showed up on screen in the final episode I wanted to throw something at the TV. Backgrounds are quite minimalistic in Kenshin 2023 and it feels like very little is moving or happening whenever our heroes are walking through the street. It really feels like they saved everything for the action scenes.

4. They followed the manga’s version of the Raijuta arc. An arc that even Watsuki himself admitted isn’t very good and that was massively improved by the 90s anime staff. I guess part of the appeal is that the new Kenshin really follows the manga, but if I wanted to see exactly what happens in the manga…I’d read manga. I own the entire manga series BTW. It’s one of the only manga series that I physically own.

If you’ve never seen Rurouni Kenshin before and you greatly prefer the aesthetic of newer anime, I’d highly recommend this one. Kenshin is a phenomenal shonen with great characters, great action, and is just amazing all around. Personally, I still prefer the 90s anime…that we all know ended with the Kyoto Arc because season 3 didn’t happen. MAL says there’s a whole 3rd season of bad filler, but real Kenshin fans know it didn’t happen! Anyways, check this series out. I think it’s one of the sleeper hits of 2023 to be honest. If you don’t want to financially support an unrepentant nonce, the series is free to watch on Kissanime, gogoanime, WCO, and a number of other sites!

Karate Master: The Hunt for the Lost Classic. The Missing Link of Battle Shonen

Remember the ancient days of early MAL? It was mostly just some European guys acting snobby and dunking on Americans for having not seen all these “essential classics” that got widely released in Europe, but not in the US. We Americans had honestly never heard of Galactic Heroes, Rose of Versailles, Ashita no Joe, and a lot of beloved anime of the 1970s and 80s. We got so thoroughly embarrassed that it helped kickstart the trend of toxic elitism that was the scourge of the online anime community for several years. Of ... course, this isn’t 2009 anymore. I’m writing this review in December of 2023. American anime fans are much better educated now and are well aware of all the essential classics. If you want to hang out on R/anime, you better have heard of Nobody’s Boy Remi. Otherwise, you’ll be widely ridiculed and get some massive downvotes, which is a fate worse than death for Redditors. Surely there aren’t any historically important anime left that almost nobody has seen and that nobody ever talks about. Right? Wrong! There is the story of that one weird shonen that was REALLY popular in Japan and absolutely nowhere else. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it inspired a bunch of stuff that you have definitely heard of. This is the legend... of Karate Master!

The Karate Master manga started in 1971 and was written by Ikki Kajiwara, the same guy who wrote Ashita no Joe, Star of the Giants, and Tiger Mask. The anime started in 1973 and was directed by Osamu Dezaki, who also directed Joe, Rose of Versailles…oh and Remi. You see? There was a reason that I referenced that one earlier in the review! Karate Master was not only a heavy inspiration for later battle shonen, but it inspired the game Street Fighter 1. The character Ryu was visually inspired by the main character of this anime, and his palette swap was named Ken because the protagonist of Karate Master is named Ken Asuka. In the live action adaptation of Karate Master, Ken Asuka was played by Sonny Chiba, whose most famous movie is “The Street Fighter”. Yes, that’s the whole reason the game is called Street Fighter!

The story of Karate Master was directly inspired by the life of famous martial artist Mas Oyama. However, the character’s name was changed to Ken Asuka for…reasons. During the final days of WW2, Ken was fully prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and die as a kamikaze pilot. However, his plane failed to take off and Japan officially surrendered later that day. Now burdened with extreme survivor’s guilt, Ken wanders the desolated ruins of his former hometown and sees that the once friendly people have become bitter and cruel in their poverty and desperation. While the American soldiers are portrayed as utterly awful, the local Japanese people are portrayed being just as awful if not even more so. With no job, home, or family left, Ken turns to using his mastery of karate to become a yakuza bodyguard. While Ken attempts to use his newfound money and influence for good, this plan backfires and he ends up meeting a kindhearted doctor who convinces him to abandon the yakuza and read the book of 5 Rings by Musashi Miyamoto. Ken finds meaning to his life once again through martial arts and trains in the mountains until he can break rocks with his fist. Then he enters the national karate championship and kicks everyone’s asses. It’s one of the earliest tournament arcs in battle shonen…and it lasts only 2 episodes. Ken is deeply disappointed by how weak everyone was and decides “fuck it! I’m going to fight a bull and kill it with my bare fists”. Then after that we enter “the bear arc” in which he decides to fight a brown bear with his fists. The first half of the series has very short arcs! Unfortunately, it’s way better than the 2nd half!

During the 2nd half of the series, Ken tours around America after having beaten every strong human and animal opponent in Japan. Somehow, almost every single person he meets happens to have lost a brother, father, or uncle at Pearl Harbor! Considering less than 3000 American sailors died at Pearl Harbor and America’s population in 1941 was already over 100 million, I think the writer has some incorrect ideas about America’s genealogy. By this point in the story, it’s the mid-1950s and none of the Americans mention Communism even once! Also, black and white Americans have zero conflict. They just both hate Japanese people with an equal amount of burning passion for the 200,000 American lives lost in the Pacific War. By contrast, Japan lost 2 million soldiers in that theater of war and 500,000 civilians and yet none of the Japanese characters resent Americans unless the Americans are just being complete assholes. It feels a little heavy handed by the tenth time that an angry mob attempts to lynch Ken for the crime of being Japanese. There is a real scene in this anime where an 80-year-old grandma impales him from behind with an umbrella containing a hidden blade. All while screaming “Kill the Jap!” The anime and manga really wanted to deliver a message that racism is bad, and war shouldn’t lead to long term hatred between nations. The anime doesn’t exactly do this in a graceful manner, but points for trying. This actually would have been a great opportunity to bring up the fact that Mas Oyama was an ethnic Korean whose birth name was Choi Yeong-eui. Ken could bring up that his people suffered under the Japanese FAR more than the Americans did, yet he bares no hatred towards them because the average Japanese person isn’t worth hating. Unfortunately, the anime and manga never once mentions this. Instead, Ken just fights a different pro-wrestler in every episode and the crowd keeps trying to kill him. Halfway through it feels like Kajiwara got really bored of writing a karate manga and decided to make it about pro-wrestling. That would also REALLY explain why this series ends super abruptly so Kajiwara could write a new manga about…you guessed it… pro-wrestling.

So why is this anime worth watching? The answer is because Karate Master is absolutely fucking insane! He kills a bull with one punch and punches it so hard that one of its horns flies off! Then he gets bored of fighting bulls and decides to beat bears to death with his fists! Kajiwara definitely wasn’t trying his hardest with this one. It’s NOT as well written as Ashita no Joe. However, it still has moments that are genuinely powerful and interesting. Especially in the first 10 episodes. Karate Master doesn’t look nearly as pretty as Joe since TMS was spending all of their budget on Lupin. However, Dezaki still manages to make this one wildly entertaining. The pacing is spectacular, and every episode ends with a cliffhanger. It’s a VERY bingeable anime! The OST only has so many tracks, but it’s extremely catchy and gets the job done! This is a very fun anime and the entire series is free to watch on Youtube with English subs, posted by TMS themselves on their official channel! The series was also brought over and released on Bluray thanks to Discotek. The US got a physical release of Karate Master and there is STILL no legal way to watch Ashita no Joe here, let alone own it on physical media! So America may not have Ashita no Joe, but now we DO have Ashita no Joe at home!

BTW, another amusing thing about Karate Master is that TMS gave it such a small budget that Dezaki decided to insert 3-4 minutes of live action stock footage into every episode! Usually, it's the same clips of people practicing karate. This did allow him to save the animation budget for the big fight scenes, but it at the cost of making it feel like Ed Wood directed this anime!

Cool Headed Hoozuki came out almost 10 years ago and to this day remains one of the most underrated comedy anime outside of Japan. The basic premise is that Buddhist Hell is an incompetently run bureaucracy and is only kept operational due to the incredible micro-managing and organizational skills of a single ogre named Hoozuki. Reception in the United States was mixed at best with many critics calling the series inexcusably boring, dry, and even "A Japanese Dilbert that requires a PhD in Japanese cultural studies to get any of the jokes. The series was licensed in the US and quietly given a physical release, ... but it never received a dub.

Honestly its reputation as dry, boring, and difficult to understand, is rather undeserved. Comedy is highly subjective, but I personally think Hoozuki is hilarious. The series does reference a lot of Japanese folktales and myths, but you really don't need a PhD in Japanese literature. All you really need is a cursory knowledge of some very famous Japanese stories that you've probably seen referenced in dozens of other anime and manga. The average viewer will have to look up a few of these stories if you want to fully appreciate every joke, but it's not that bad. It also references 1980s anime like Fist of the North Star and Urusei Yatsura almost as often as it does mythology! Let me give you an example. One of the jokes is that they meet Minamoto no Yoshitsune, who is a character from a Japanese epic poem called Tale of the Heike. Yoshitsune is a highly effeminate looking samurai who is secretly a badass and was trained by the tengu, who are Japanese mythical creatures who live in the mountains and according to tradition taught humans how to do sumo wrestling. Since Tale of the Heike repeatedly describes him as effeminate, the anime imagines him as a stereotypical "pretty boy" character with a large female following. However, he was raised by tengu and wishes to become fat so he can learn the ways of sumo, much to the horror of his fangirls. The joke isn't really hard to follow once you have a basic idea of who this character is supposed to be. This guy shows up in the game "Okami" as a character named Waka btw. I told you that you've probably seen these characters before if you consume Japanese media.

Hoozuki is an episodic comedy, so of course it relies heavily on its colorful character cast to carry the goofy humor. Hoozuki is the very deadpan, loveable asshole. King Enma is the "boke" or funny guy who does the stupid shit that Hoozuki reacts to. My favorite character though is the rabbit from the fairy tale "Kachi Kachi Yama". There's this weird Japanese fairy tale about a tanuki who was caught by a farmer. The tanuki begs for his life so pitifully that the farmer's wife lets him go. The tanuki then repays the farmer’s wife by raping her, murdering her, and cooking her flesh into a stew. The tanuki then disguises himself as the wife and tricks the farmer into eating the stew before immediately transforming back and mocking the farmer for having eaten his dead wife. The farmer is so crushed with sadness and rage that he visits his friend the rabbit who agrees to carry out the wrath of heaven on the tanuki. The rabbit ends up playing a series of incredibly painful tricks on the tanuki including setting him on fire, rubbing pepper in the wounds, and eventually drowning him in a lake while bashing his head in with an oar. The rabbit appears in the anime as Hell’s most gifted torturer and like in the original fairy tale is kind of an unhinged psychopath. Even after centuries, the rabbit still holds a powerful grudge against the tanuki and is driven into a blind rage whenever anyone mentions the word “tanuki” in any context. For example, the rabbit carries out extreme punishment on corporate white-collar criminals when she is reminded by Hoozuki that they are referred to in Japanese slang as “clever tanuki”.

Hoozuki also has a Chinese rival that's extremely similar to him, but they've hated each other for so long that neither can remember how it started, and of course it was over something extremely ridiculous. Japan's cultural rivalry and pointless antagonism with Chinese civilization is poked fun at frequently. Hoozuki could get into offensive territory for some, but it gives shit to everyone. Momotaro is a very important folklore figure for Japanese nationalists and the series jobs him out in the first 2 episodes and makes him a complete chump. Hoozuki makes Satan and the demons of Christian Hell into absolute buffoons and also makes fun of some Chinese figures, but it's definitely NOT a series that Japanese ultra-nationalists would appreciate.

While Hoozuki may not be to everyone’s comedic tastes, I would highly recommend checking it out. The series is widely available with excellent subs that explain all the cultural references that non-Japanese audiences might miss. As for who I would especially recommend this to, the Hoozuki mangaka is a huge fan of Urusei Yatsura and this is immediately evident if you’ve seen or read that. This is definitely a must watch for fans of Rumiko Takahashi. Even if you’re not a big fan of Grandma Takahashi though, I would still recommend watching a few episodes and seeing what you think. You’ll know pretty quickly if this is going to be your kind of comedy or not.

Since there's a new Indiana Jones movie out, I figure now is the perfect time to do some anime archeology! Today, we're going to be examining the very first giant Super Robot anime that was produced in full color. Astroganger the anime was released in October of 1972 and beat Mazinger Z's anime adaptation to Japanese television screens by 2 months. The first super robot anime was Tetsujin 28 but that was in black and white like most all anime from the 1960s.

Astroganger was produced by Studio Knack, who is mostly remembered today for their less than stellar anime projects. The same writer, director, animators, ... and voice actors would reunite just 2 years after Astroganger to make Chargeman Ken, considered by most Japanese otaku to be the single worst anime ever made. While nothing can fully explain the magical disaster that is Chargeman Ken, today's anime at least gives some context and clears up a little bit of the mystery behind the worst anime of all time.

Astroganger begins with a story that wouldn't feel out of place in the Silver Age of American comics or the Golden Age of science fiction. A famous astronomer notices that entire systems are disappearing all over the galaxy. One night, he sees a UFO crash near his observatory and meets an alien woman who is the last surviving member of her species. This alien woman named Maya tells him that an evil, shape shifting species known as the "Blasters" are wiping out entire star systems to harvest their energy and raw materials. If they aren't stopped, they will destroy all other sentient life in the Milky Way. Fortunately, she was able to bring a substance from her home planet before the Blasters destroyed it. This substance is a living, organic metal that can be crafted into a giant guardian robot and controlled by a member of her species. However, they didn't have time to make one of these robots before the Blasters invaded their peaceful world...apparently. Mayu and the astronomer, who is clearly modeled after Colonel Sanders for some reason, end up having a child together named Kentaro and building a giant robot that she brings to life by sacrificing her own. The robot is actually organic, fully sentient, and feels pain and emotions, but does NOT contain the soul of our hero's mother. Hideaki Anno is safe. Of all the old mecha he stole elements from I don't think that list includes Astroganger. Kentaro is able to merge with Ganger with a magical pendant, but he doesn't actually pilot the robot in a traditional sense. Ganger can operate completely autonomously, but he fights like an idiot. When Kentaro uses his pendent, he turns into energy and merges with the robot to lend his brains and creativity to Ganger. This allows Ganger to fight slightly less like a dumbass, which is always enough to win because Ganger is nearly invincible due to special material he's composed of.

If you've seen Chargeman Ken, you should already be seeing the similarities. However, Astroganger actually explains shit since the episodes aren't all 5 minutes long. Chargeman was an ill-conceived attempt to recycle Astroganger (often literally in terms of tracing animation) as an abridged version but assumes that the audience has already seen Astroganger. Kentaro violently hates the Blasters and wants to wipe them out before they can wipe out any more species. This makes sense, since they wiped out his mother's entire species and he blames them for her death. Kentaro's father is less quick to violence and acts as a counterbalance to his son's brash youthfulness. Chargeman wants to wipe out the aliens invading Earth, but their background and motivations are never explained. Some are even shown to be good and Chargeman acknowledges this, but still jovially wipes out an entire species without stopping to consider any other alternatives for even a second. While Kentaro's father is a wise and noble guide, Ken's father is somehow even worse than he is! Chargeman Ken took a story and characters that were already bare bones and made it completely incomprehensible by removing all context and explanations for anything.

Astroganger was a low budget anime created to sell cheap robot toys to small children. Having said that, it still looks ok for the time and for what it is. Some scenes even look better than the much more famous Mazinger Z from the same year. While the character art strongly resembles that used in Chargeman Ken, the animation and technical quality are lightyears ahead of its infamous successor. That's because Knack actually worked on this one. Most Chargeman episodes were apparently made in a single day so everyone could go to the beach! That's a direct quote from one of the surviving members of Studio Knack.

While Astroganger is still fondly remembered in parts of the Arabic speaking world, this anime is definitely showing its age. Unless you’re extremely devoted to studying the history of anime, you’re going to struggle getting through all 26 episodes of this. If you thought Ideon was dated and hard to watch by modern standards, this is a step below that. Fortunately, you can just watch episodes 1-3 and then 26 and you’re basically getting the whole experience. The other episodes are all essentially filler and follow the same formula. I wouldn’t exactly say Astroganger is a good anime, but it’s a masterpiece relative to Chargeman Ken and Invisible Detective Akira, which is another piece of shit that Knack made. I would highly recommend Astroganger to ironic fans of Chargeman Ken to shed light on the context and background behind that atrocity. I would also recommend this series to fans of Super Robot anime due to its historic significance. If you’re just looking for the greatest, most essential anime to watch from the 1970s, go watch Rose of Versailles or something. You probably want to skip this one.