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It opens with a gradeschooler sword-sparring in grandpa’s trapdoor-laden ninja house. An explosion blows a hole in the clay-tiled roof, revealing the skyline of the fictional American city of “Brad”, and perfectly sets expectations for the level of anime pulp one can expect from "Blackfox" by studio “3Hz”. Though created largely by different people, the vibe is similar to their previous "Princess Principal" TV series. Being a tightly packed 90-minute actioneer, Blackfox also evokes pulp action OVAs from decades past and sidesteps the pitfalls of a longer format. For a certain generation of otaku, there’s nostalgic fun to be found in this action romp.

A suspect ... hangs from a city rooftop as the ninja-clad avenger squeezes him for the location of the villain’s secret hideout. She then zips away by grappling hook into the dark night. If there wasn’t already an anime called "Ninja Batman"…

Blackfox, in its gleeful cribbing of pop culture, lives or dies by its kitsch value. But it's the type of kitsch that transcends its unoriginality through clean, charismatic execution. The action kicks with an intelligible choreography that is rare in the effects-crazed webgen age. The heroes are charming without being overbearing. The villain, however, is deliciously over-the-top. It never oversells its tropes with long-winded explainers — it knows exactly what each is worth, and it shows more than tells.

Why anime originals get made is often a mystery. Blackfox, simultaneously debuting in Japanese theaters and to western viewers via Crunchyroll, seems like a tailor-made export product. Anime girls, ninjas, robots, superpowers… What more could a hypothetical westerner want? Perhaps the amusement of a portrait of America through the eyes of anime?

Stepping off the plane after two weeks of touring major Japanese cities, impeccably clean jungles of concrete, I saw urban America through such eyes myself. The thoroughly hand-painted backgrounds of Blackfox capture my reverse culture-shock in visceral detail. Grime cakes every surface. Weeds punch through the cracks of concrete. No coat of paint is left unchipped; no wallpaper untorn.

But the dilapidated hellhole in which I apparently live has some perks: the grassy front lawns and sidewalks of suburbia, the tall ceilings, the spacious kitchens equipped with gas-powered stovetops, the navigable regularity of a street grid, and the coherent urban architecture that follows. One cannot help but continually pause the frame to take in its uncanny world of cutesy anime girls adorned in modern Japanese fashions living in a cartoon of urban America, adding yet another layer of kitsch. And like the best anime films, Blackfox is carried by its production design, though in a somewhat unintended fashion.

Though Blackfox is far from a great anime, it’s the perfect length at 90 minutes. Its cliché, paper-thin premise would not reliably support any extension and that’s just fine. Sometimes a spell of ninja action is just the thing for a lazy afternoon.

One could write a deep dive, I imagine, into the ballet and folk tale motifs at the core of "Princess Tutu". Call me uncultured but I am incapable of writing such a review, and yet I enjoyed the anime immensely. Its status as a cult classic magical girl anime series, the supposed magnum opus of Junichi Satō’s career, and the originator of the classic "What I Watched" meme, spurred me to confirm whether the show could be accurately characterized with an image of dueling guitar ninjas.

"Tutu" comes from a certain culture within Toei Animation. Its shoujo series from "Sailor Moon" through the turn of the ... millennium gave birth to numerous industry titans like Kunihiko Ikuhara & his many protégés, and household name Mamoru Hosoda. To call that culture defining would be an understatement, and stalwart director Junichi Satō was arguably the ringleader. Like Ikuhara & "Utena", Satō also saw fit to leave the nest with his ex-Toei buddies and eventually create his own postmodern magical girl series. (It would be wrong to attribute Tutu entirely to Satō, but I use him as a reference point for an era of Toei culture.)

Like Utena, Princess Tutu takes place in a fantasy purgatory world driven by folk tale logic and stage aesthetics. But rather than evoke the gaudy spectacle of Takarazuka Revue musicals, it instead depicts a world of ballet through its lovely, rounded character designs that serve its drama, visual comedy, and highly unusual action scenes.

It has weekly villains. There is a (mercifully brief) transformation ritual. But one does not come to Princess Tutu for its meager genre trappings. It’s a world where the emotional truth is the only truth, and emotion given form through artistic expression is the truest strength. Its supernatural duels are ballet dance battles set to the orchestral swells of romantic-era music. Though the animation itself rarely transcends the ordinary, its inspired designwork and aesthetic ideas create a level of joyous spectacle every episode that is rarely experienced anywhere else.

Its characters, symbols of beauty, tragedy and yearning in a fairy tale world, are only as fleshed out as they need to be; any more and the spell would be broken. Its music pieces that play for minutes on end, sometimes occupying an entire B-part of an episode, lull me into a fantasy in a way that a bog-standard anime BGM wouldn’t. Princess Tutu would lose its very being as a manga or novel — it’s an original anime in the meaningful sense.

Its not without flaws, but even its flaws have character. A cackling, meddlesome god has a knack for disrupting the flow of each episode; he gleefully tortures his audience with his prattling. Its quaint digital effects don’t always hold up, but at least they are employed with relative restraint. Its mildly annoying “quirky” side characters still serve to add some levity and slapstick before the storm rolls over the landscape of this NHK children's anime.

As villains rise to heroism and heroes fall from grace, and as ominous crowfeathers set the stage for another showdown of pointes and pirouettes, Princess Tutu enters its element and all else is forgiven. Or as the old meme goes, the ninjas are tuning their guitars.

Timelessness is overrated. Every creation comes from an era of media culture, and even the most “timeless” productions can’t help but reflect contemporary trends and zeitgeist.

“Bubblegum Crisis” is the opposite of timeless. Its creators, voracious creatures of popular media culture, slathered a goopy concoction of everything that was hip at the time onto each animation cel. The series has no original bone in its body. Everything is a reference. It has nothing to say other than, “This is what cool is.” As a result, it is one of the purest anime time capsules you can watch.

BGC takes place in a true-to-genre “Megatokyo”, a turbulent east-meets-west ... cyberpunkian metropolis in which shadowy megacorps pull the strings. Murderous Replicants and Terminators prowl the neon-lit streets, kept in check only by a super-sentai bishoujo team and their transforming mecha-motorbikes and acrobatic power armor. Lasers and explosions dance across kaleidoscopic chrome to full-vocal 80s hard rock. It’s adolescent hyper-kitsch fit for an otaku.

What it lacks in taste, it makes up in design-work. The joy of watching BGC today is its now-retrofuture world of chunky appliance-like computers, physical media, handheld gadgetry, toy-like vehicles, colorful fashions, and range of sci-fi-appropriate architectural & interior-design styles from modern, postmodern, and high-tech. When it comes to late-80s tech & design, it oozes.

As the creative personalities driving the series grow ambitious, it becomes more apparent when one is watching a Masami Ōbari episode (e.g. #6) with his obsessively detailed mecha animation, or a Satoshi Urushihara episode (#7) with his crisply rendered bishoujo. By the end, it takes another hard turn and resembles Kenichi Sonoda’s “Gunsmith Cats”. Such hobby-like swings in style are a reminder that passionate people made the series; they clearly loved the stuff.

The OVA’s storytelling noticeably improves with each installment. In its finale (#8), which devotes ample time to the rhythms and anxieties of the bishoujo-hero lifestyle, its previously underdeveloped protagonists begin to take on a new dimension. It’s unfortunate that it ends on that high note. (“Bubblegum Crash” is a poor followup.)

Bubblegum Crisis exists in a continuum of genre anime, with “Akira” and (Mamoru Oshii’s) “Ghost in the Shell” serving as its high points. But where those distilled a handful of genre concepts into profound works of pop entertainment, BGC is the raw, unrefined sludge of late-80s otaku culture. And sometimes, an otaku just needs it raw.

I can understand why director Naoko Yamada, after the headrush of plot points and emotional bombast that is "Koe no Katachi", would want to produce something as minimal as "Liz to Aoitori". The 90 minute drama follows two, or arguably two and a half characters. There is only one conflict. Much of the dialog is background texture. Much of the foreground is Yamada’s signature closeups of meticulously animated body language.

The film is an exercise in maximizing the fewest story elements. It takes place in the world of "Hibike! Eupohonium" but strips out much of the marketable anime sheen of its television counterpart, for example reducing ... the characters to lanky forms of flat pastel contained in fragile linework, and pushing all extraneous elements of the franchise into the deep background. Instead of perky, hummable BGM jingles, the soundtrack forms a bed of wistful ambiance. But this director, with this studio, is primed to tell this school drama with an emotional fidelity that no other team can. Liz to Aoitori carries moments of profound subtlety and intense beauty, with captivating and communicative music performance scenes that begin to recall Isao Takahata’s "Gauche the Cellist".

But ultimately, despite its achievements, there’s not a whole lot of *there* there. Though the story is interwoven with a fairy tale, it lacks the fantastical whimsy of Takahata’s film, or the density and complexity of Koe no Katachi. In a way, Yamada is even more of a realist than Takahata is. When her exercise in minimalism wraps up, it leaves little impression other than to hope she tackles more ambitious subject matter in the future.

KoiAme isn't what I thought it would be, but it's perfectly okay. The transgressive nature of the relationship isn't played for drama at all, actually. Though both this and "Nazo no Kanojo X" are seinen manga adaptations, they come from the same director and exhibit similar sensibilities. The relationships in both remain vague and are milked for every last drop of nostalgia, alongside continual interludes of pianos and strings.

But where Kanojo X entertains an emotionally one-note fantasy of adolescence with one-dimensional teens, KoiAme is at least grounded in the mundane world starring characters with responsibilities and aspirations, even if they fall into familiar archetypes — ... say, the star athlete who suffers a serious injury and severs ties with their team out of anxiety and despair.

Nothing especially novel happens, but it does go through the full motions of its character arcs and seasons the storytelling with a layer of well-rendered visual symbolism. In other words, one could call KoiAme a story well told.

The go-to descriptors of "shounen" and "seinen" lack the granularity to describe Kabaneri, which has a degree of painfully self-unaware bombast that only teenagers will love. As a throwaway popcorn spectacle, it has some silver linings. This all-new sequel flick, which plays as a self-contained story arc, first and foremost delivers on action, with plenty of rifle-bayonet acrobatics courtesy of covergirl Mumei. Though both steampunk and zombie hordes are now embarrassingly passé, Taishō-roman will never go out of style in my book, and Mikimoto's retro character designs backed with Wit Studio's "make-up animation" process remain a visual treat. Also, the all-dancing end credits.

I've... disembarked... the ... Kabaneri train around episode #7, which is just as well because people tell me the rest got "Wit Studioed". I simply lost interest in the one-note affair from the Michael Bay of anime: Tetsurou Araki. But sometimes a splashy movie is excuse enough to hop back on for a short ride. And yup, "Unato Kessen" is still the Kabaneri I remember.

The weaknesses of each individual movie — uneven pacing, abrupt endings and dubious adaptation choices — are erased when seen in its proper form. Up-and-coming director Tatsuya Oishi vanished into a cave after 2009's "Bakemonogatari" and emerged several years later with his over-3-hours-long prequel. Aniplex trisected its release but fortunately a local theater ran a triple-screening: the only worthwhile way to watch it.

There are three ways to approach an adaptation of Nishio Isin's pulp novel. One is to clean up its more dubious aspects and present it to a mainstream audience. Another is to adapt the material faithfully to please preexisting fans, presumably the current ... TV anime's route.

Oishi's adaptation represents a third path, arguably the most honest path: amplify the source material's trash appeal until it becomes visual comedy. Hanekawa, Araragi's ally and sex object, is redesigned into a grotesque uniform-stretching tit-monster with a cat's grin. The boob-touching scene of the novel is now an over-the-top spectacle that prompts guffaws of laughter and disbelief. (I'm glad I saw it with an audience!) Its vampiric showdowns also become strings of imaginative sight gags in Oishi's hands.

But calling it subversive would be a step too far. It still performs its perfunctory duty. Reams of dull, expository dialog form connections with preexisting franchise lore. And what it is, fundamentally, hasn't changed from novel to film — an escapist, nostalgic genre story that is self-aware but not especially critical.

Within those constraints, however, we get a bold visual reimagining of the "Monogatari" world that makes it difficult to return to the cookie-cutter TV sequels. One wonders what's next for Tatsuya Oishi. Maybe he'll reassume his place in the Aniplex-Shaft sequelization assembly line. Maybe he'll disappear into another cave for a new special project. Or maybe, like many Shaft directors before him, he'll decide that he's outgrown the nest.

Adapting the cyberpunk cult classic "BLAME!" is like adapting "Dark Souls". The source material revels in its indifference and brutality. A strong sense of the grotesque underpins a nightmarish and maddeningly cryptic world. It's everything that a popcorn flick isn't.

Polygon Pictures attempts the impossible by making a popcorn flick from the Dark Souls of manga. What was once grotesque is now cute. What was once gory is now a merciful camera turn and a suggestive blood splotch. What was once an eerie vista of brutalist forms is now chatty human drama. What was once a chasm of unknowable secrets is now an exposition dump. Its ... many pared-off edges make it a tween-friendly product, but will people buy a softer, rounder "BLAME!" ?

As a popcorn film it seems perfectly serviceable, but I am not one to judge. I am a hardcore fan who dreams of a hardcore adaptation. This is for the "Sidonia" crowd by the Sidonia people, including "BLAME!" creator Tsutomu Nihei who encouraged the studio to make their adaptation less obtuse and more "pop", contrary to his 1998 original. By trading its soul, it arguably achieves that.

“Anime writing” is a derisive term, invoking one-dimensional characters and dead-simple exposition, but ”The Eccentric Family” is an exception to the conventions of TV anime. It helps that it’s based on a series of novels of the non-light variety. Its characters speak in formalities — what they say is rarely what they mean. This gives every dialog layers of meaning, painting a portrait of Kyōto that goes deeper than its iconic exterior.

"Uchouten Kazoku" reveals a rich interior world; a tapestry of families, clans, and clubs, all with their own culture of traditions, titles, ceremonies and protocol. Our protagonist, part of a family of shapeshifting tanuki, ... penetrates these hidden societal layers through his myriad connections, at one point landing in literal Hell (Jigoku), revealed as simply a realm where demons live and work; he tries his best to fit in. As the “fool” of the series, he inadvertently or deliberately sows chaos, and disrupts the best-laid plans of evildoers who count on the clockwork rhythm of Kyōtoan society to sway in their favor.

Each scene and conversation exists within a hierarchy of societal context, and the dialog serves as a critical guide, communicating the relationship between characters and their affiliations through degrees of formality. To my gaijin noggin, this seems to be not just an extrapolation of Kyōtoan culture (which is steeped in tradition and exclusivity e.g. with geisha), but of Japanese society itself, and the way its language is built to serve it.

To the anime’s credit, one doesn’t need to know Japanese to pick up on that, at least I don’t think. But its writing does put the audience in a very different mindset — a more active level of engagement — than the average anime. And for that, along with its many other superb aspects (storyboarding, design, animation), "Uchouten Kazoku" is a TV anime of rare sophistication.

In 2017, cult anime creator Masaaki Yuasa directed two feature films out of his new Science Saru studio. "Lu" is the weaker of the two. Watching it is like watching three anime movies at the same time. Whatever conceptual or emotional core it could’ve had is deafened in a cacophony of tangential ideas and subplots.

A teen weighed down by his parents' divorce joins a band whose practice sessions summon a mermaid in a declining fishing town. Meanwhile, the town opens a mermaid-themed amusement park. Meanwhile, there’s a cataclysmic curse that threatens to swallow the town. Meanwhile…

"Lu" can’t care less about its own subject matter, which ... is disappointing considering the storytelling strength of Yuasa’s other recent works. Rather than develop any facet of it to satisfaction, the hokey film dashes from one animated spectacle to the next, which is entertaining in its own way, considering that Team Yuasa are no mere Studio Ghibli pretenders on the visual front.

Science Saru has controversially trained its core animators in the forbidden art of Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate). Through computer-assisted inbetweening, they’ve created a world of constant, mesmerizing motion while avoiding the robotic feel of something like "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". Some sakuga-heads may disagree, but it’s an impressive technical showpiece that makes uniquely different tradeoffs in the limited-animation world. It’s a shame this wizardry was applied to something so otherwise conventional.