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A one-shot where you're never quite sure what's real and what's not, what's part of a movie and what's part of the real story of the manga. It's certainly unpredictable from beginning to end, it becomes very meta and is full of love for film... and in between it tells you a story about emotional closure after the death of a loved one.
The panneling is very simple but very cool, all the panels are the same (like the frames of a video) and he also adds motion blur from time to time to add realism to the protagonist's recordings. A funny guy, this Fujimoto.

Hikari no Machi is a set of four small intertwined stories where, as is traditional in Inio Asano, murky and existentialist themes are explored in a slice of life code favored by his very careful and almost hyper-realistic drawing of the scenarios. This is one of his first works, but his mark is already there.
The characters are a bunch of young people lost in life, people with suicidal, depressive or criminal tendencies, each one with a different vision of life and how to face their problems and concerns. Their psychological depth is very well captured despite the short space in which we get to know ... them. As they are intertwined, sometimes almost tangentially, in each other's stories, we see other sides of their personalities, other sides of the story they have told us from their perspective. The approach that Asano takes to a story is interesting, because in the end we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Asano tries to break this by showing us a multi-faceted prism, a three-dimensional story.
The manga's setting plays very much in favor of its themes. The setting is one of these newly built but lifeless residential neighborhoods, commuter towns whose streets are empty even on a Sunday afternoon, a day that families spend at the nearest shopping mall. The empty scenarios, absences emphasized by the great amount of light that illuminates the neighborhood and leaves nothing to the imagination, exposes the anxieties and anguish of its inhabitants, naked before the absolute clarity of the day. It is possible that in such a fragmented and hollow community nothing really makes sense, because the loneliness felt is even deeper than that of a hermit who isolates himself by choice. No matter how bright your home is, you will always be cold without the warmth of the community you desperately seek without even realizing it.

Golden Boy is such a difficult anime for me to say anything about. In a way, I don't really feel comfortable in the fact that I've actually enjoyed it (quite a lot, to be honest, as it can be delightfully funny (https://youtu.be/bHmBSfci0yE)¹ and also very inspiring (https://youtu.be/a-SDwYnIDJ0)), since it can get pretty misogynistic in the way it portrays some women, and that the leitmotiv of the show is that the main character is always, somehow, better at their job than the women he confronts and flirts with despite not knowing anything about the subject in question at the beginning of the episode and that the ... women are actually skilful and pundits at their respective fields. This is incredibly patronizing, and it really disgusts me.
But.
And this is a big but(t).
It can be viewed from a different perspective. That of a man that only cares about self-improvement and self-overcoming, that goes lightly about life and only considers stopping by to help others with their problems, a man that does not constrain his sexual urges by social and cultural rules and by which he is liberated as a pure uninhibited energy. And that's the thing, he actually never consummates that urge, perhaps oblivious to the fact that he could have done it, perhaps knowingly forfeiting it, and that's one of the reasons why I truly believe that the show has a good heart at its core. It's certainly not for everyone, and sometimes I had to pause it to actually register the absolute crazyness of certain scenes (which almost always had to do with sexual themes, like... I mean, WHY is gainaxing actually a thing. WHY, GOD, WHY). It’s pervy, it’s deranged and it can be insane, but that’s also youth.
I feel very conflicted about it. But I also think that, in a way, you couldn't tell this story with a different spirit. A different approach, maybe? Certainly, since one can explore and free his innermost sexual spirit in a myriad different ways without being less nietzschean and being kinder to your surroundings.

¹Mitsuo Iso was the key animator for this scene. That fact alone justifies the watching of the show.

~Multilingual review, English & Español~

The thing I hate the most about anime is when the writers think you're an idiot and they explain everything to you (even though most of the times they are pretty obvious things), feeling the need to make a flashback to things that happened THREE MINUTES EARLIER.
If you make these kinds of things eight times per episode, mix it with one-dimensional and archetypical characters, overused themes, pedophile fanservice (for Christ sake Ochaco Uraraka is fifteen years old, couldn't you restrain your urges of making her heroine-suit so tight???). Every episode is a different tournament, the plot is just dreadful, the villains ... are....well, lets just say that the villains don't have really strong motivations behind their acts, and even with that, the series insist in making it an absolute Good and Evil thing, it's just the same kindergarten Manichaeism we have seen a thousand times before, booooooooooooring. If you blend all these things, you will obtain Boku No Hero, a major bluff that makes me wonder why people hold it in such high regard.
Now let's talk about Bakugo. Wtf. It's the most annoying character of them all (and this show is full of lame, silly and annoying characters making lame, silly and annoying "comedy"). I believe the teachers had a meeting to decide if Bakugo should be accepted into the Academy and it went like this: "are we really going to train a boy which is clearly unstable and short-tempered, full of hate and showing a lot of the traits of potential villains? OF COURSE WE ARE, AND WE ARE GOING TO GIVE HIM TWO GRENADES TO COVER HIS ARMS THAT CAN EXPLODE AND DESTROY BUILDINGS, HELL YES". Not even a doubt? A psychological test to determine if he is fit to become a hero? Without a psychological treatment to understand and fix his anger issues and his inferiority complex disguised as superiority complex? Because all, ALL he says is AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH DEKUUUUUUUUU IM STRONGEEEEEEEEER DIEEEEEEEEEE. I don't know, but there's plenty red lines there.
And yes, the other characters are really lame, annoying and not funny. As an example I'm thinking about that grape-head kid, an annoying perv that makes you wish you've had never ever watched any episode of this show.


La cosa que mas odio del anime es cuando se cree que eres tonto y te tiene que explicar absolutamente todo, haciendo flashbacks a cosas que han ocurrido tres minutos antes.
Si haces esto ocho veces por capítulo, lo juntas con personajes unidimensionales y arquetípicos, temas manidos, fanservice pedófilo (Ochaco Uraraka tiene 15 años, a que vienen ese traje de heroína tan apretado???) , que cada capítulo sea un torneo, argumento xd, villanos con motivaciones ridículas y maniqueísmo de preescolar (has robado una cartera?? claramente eres la encarnación del Mal Absoluto), te queda Boku No Hero, una serie muy mediocre que hace que me pregunte por qué la gente la tiene en tan alta estima.

Ahora hablemos de Bakugo. Wtf. Es el personaje más molesto de todos (y este espectáculo está lleno de personajes estúpidos y molestos que hacen una "comedia" cutre, tonta y molesta). Creo que, para decidir si Bakugo era aceptado en la Academia, los profesores tuvieron una reunión y dijeron algo así: "¿Realmente vamos a entrenar a un niño que es claramente inestable e irascible, lleno de odio y que muestra muchos de los rasgos de un villano potencial? POR SUPUESTO QUE SÍ, Y LE VAMOS A DAR DOS GRANADAS COMO BRAZOS QUE PUEDEN EXPLOTAR Y DESTRUIR EDIFICIOS, CLARO QUE SÍ". ¿Ni siquiera dudaron? ¿Le hicieron una prueba psicológica para determinar si es apto para convertirse en héroe? ¿No creen que va a necesitar un tratamiento psicológico para entender y arreglar sus problemas de ira y complejo de inferioridad camuflado como complejo de superioridad? Porque todo lo que dice es AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH DEKUUUUUUUUUU SOY MUCHO MÁS FUERTE QUE TUUUUUUU MUEREEEEEEE.
Y sí, los otros personajes son realmente patéticos, molestos y no graciosos. Como ejemplo, estoy pensando en ese niño cabeza de uva, un pervertido que te hace desear no haber visto nunca ningún episodio de este producto.