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This show was misunderstood by Western audiences when it came out, and it still is a few years later.

So I will spoil it for you: It is not a Zootopia metaphor. If you think it is trying to be that, you'll hate it! It is a KLK metaphor: It's about Japan's past, present and future. That is why the main characters are specifically mythical beings(tanuki, kitsune, okami) and why there is a plot spanning human/beastman dynamics, corruption, cults, and immortality: it's alluding to various aspects of Japan's past that it has forgotten or chose to hide in the present, which new generations can rediscover and ... be empowered by.

And I will admit that it's pretty inaccessible because the show allows no time for an entry point beyond that. It's a big metaphor with a lot of facets to explore, so it has to rush its characters through each scenario. And it does not try to present a complex answer to its themes, either, because like a lot of Trigger shows, it's a fairy tale where cool, highly exaggerated things happen because you want to believe they could happen. So if you don't know what you're supposed to believe in, it's going to miss and feel unearned. The "10" rating is because when taken in context, they pulled it off, and I really can't fault the writing - there are a lot of satisfying, well-animated moments packed into each episode, but the viewing needs to be spread out to appreciate it.

This is the sort of anime that is obviously a director's indulgence, but Tatsuki ensures that it "goes somewhere" and finishes in less time than a single "full" TV episode; I would consider Vlad Love a comparable recent series. The difference is, Vlad Love doesn't commit to the bit and meanders between telling a traditional story and just "doing whatever" which makes it feel like a huge timesink. Hentatsu is entirely "doing whatever" and that works a lot better.

The content is a pastiche of previous Tatsuki/Yaoyorozu works, thus we have an animated talk show set in a mysterious post-apocalypse, plus a few flashy action scenes. ... It doesn't have any overarching message, although there's plenty of meta-commentary. It's really like one big calling card - "here's more of the thing you liked" - and there really isn't much to say about it as a story. The animation likewise is of the same style as usual - 2D backgrounds, 3D characters, with most of the focus being on establishing feeling and motion rather than nailing rendering details. Tatsuki's style is unique and authentic, and that's why I like it,

Two men fighting. A setup that drives countless fictional stories, and one which Tiger Mask W delivers in spades.

If you are browsing this and ordinarily enjoy a good battle shonen, just go watch Tiger Mask W, you need read no further. Pro wrestling - at least as it's portrayed here - is basically the same thing with more spandex. They still have attacks with cool names and take implausibly large hits, but there are no gruesome deaths or spirit bombs on display, just an occasional "they'll never fight again" killer move to raise the stakes. It's a Toei series, so the quality is typically choppy ... and relies a lot on "classic" compositions with a static camera against dynamic still poses, but it's well-directed and sustains a feeling of movement for an extended period. Pretty much every fight is easy to follow, flows well, and engrosses the emotions.

OK, you say. The fighting is pretty good. What else is there? The other important part of a series about fighting, of course: giving the characters good reasons to fight. The main plot of Tiger Mask W is a straightforward revenge story, and many of the subplots are roughly as predictable. But like the fighting, it manages to juggle a fairly large cast and develop them at a steady, easy-to-follow pacing. Everything ties together in a neat, by-the-book fashion, which is in keeping with the "throwback" feel of the visuals. You've seen it all before, but rarely with execution this strong. It's not a twisty, meta, or philosophical type of show, it just delivers the goods on satisfying setups and resolution, over and over. Most seasonal anime could stand to learn from this example.

I actually started watching Tiger Mask W with its final episode, which was a chance happy accident: the conclusion to the main plot was in the previous episode, and this was more like an OVA-style epilogue that acts as a teaser for a possible new season or spinoff, with a focus on side characters and stage-setting for new plot arcs. I really hope they go through with producing more of this series, because it's like comfort food to me.

I really like Steven Universe, and there are some necessary comparisons that have to be drawn between that show and Alice to Zouroku:

Child with mysterious powers taken in by adoptive parents

No true villains

Coming-of-age portrayal through scenarios of social and emotional discovery, accented but not reliant on fight scenes

Of course, in the details and execution, everything is different about Alice. An "Alice in Wonderland" aesthetic drives how the powers work(as you might expect), and while Alice is powerful she is utterly clueless about the world, making her a great foil for Zouroku, a traditional family values parent who is elderly and physically vulnerable, despite his assuring ... demeanor. There are government agents and other kids with powers that variously intervene and propel along a larger story, but the plot structuring is loose, and the tone often shifts to warm slice of life character moments without any overt foreshadowing.

It comes off feeling both well-rounded and unpredictable: a consistent pleasure to watch.

Pascal-sensei is a series that I picked up on a whim, kept thinking I would watch one more and then drop, but then never did. I'm still here 8 episodes in and will probably stick it out. What happened?

Basically, this is a comedy sketch show with a bottom-of-the-barrel premise: new teacher Pascal is weird and not smart, yet surprisingly capable. Over-the-top school hijinx ensue. The character designs are tedious, the OP does a good job of irritating me, and there's minimal continuity leading to a lot of forgettable one-off jokes. So the expectations are low. But then it usually over-delivers in its execution with a ... great twist ending, so I'm left thinking, "Well, that was actually pretty good. Guess I'll watch the next one."

I can't recommend this show to everyone, but it might work for you if you like your humor silly and guns-blazing.

Hana no Uta is a show that I like because of all the things it does differently. It consistently fails to adhere to an ordinary story pacing, and it relishes in, and often pulls off, fast tone shifts. The themes have a lot of stuff to do with demons and half-demons and whether they should be protected or banished, and yet, rather than treating this as a grave affair that propels every event, I felt more often like I was in a blended slice-of-life that sometimes has action and drama. There are story arcs, of course, but it often feels like the show and the ... characters have mutually agreed to give them lip service so that they can go do something way more interesting with the screen time. You can guess what's coming next, but you don't know what the "good scene" will be, because it could be anything. And the cast is large, with enough depth and variety that you can easily lose track.

All of this makes it less readily consumable and closed-ended than your typical TV anime, and more like a messy world you could put in the background on loop, noticing different things each time. In some ways this might feel like a deficiency of being a one-cour show, rushing through a lot more than it has any right to, but if there is any example of how to pull it off in a satisfying way, this is one of them.

Hyper Police is a great setting with some fun action scenarios, hindered mostly by weak writing. To get that out of the way: one-note 90's-era cliches and stereotypes drive almost everything, and the plotting is mostly episodic with gradual changes in the recurring characters, which is enough to keep it alive but not enough to make it inherently compelling. The finale baffles me just as much as ever on a rewatch of the series, almost a decade later: although it's a cool ending, and some of the best writing in the series, the big moments all read as non-sequiturs thrown in to make it try ... to add up to something.

And all of that is a shame, because the setting is full of little worldbuilding details that bring it alive: The bounty hunting business, the post-apocalyptic cityscape, the street scenes with dozens of different anthro people and moments of physical comedy. It just gets dragged down by all the screen time spent on reprisals of predictable character moments, simple misunderstanding plots, and low-risk reset-to-zero conclusions: things that infest anime today too, but are a little more grating for being dated.

However, when it works, it's good. Generic villain characters frame most of the episodes, and those are great foils that consistently bring out the best of the main cast. Age has mostly been kind to the visuals, too: no high budget animation, but the visual design has some classic stuff. These good elements are good enough - and distinctive enough - that I wanted to rewatch it over "better" old series, which might be enough to recommend it to a discerning viewer(given the caveats).

Rakugo is a series about Beautiful Storytelling, and it is perhaps unsurprising that it turns out to be a Beautiful Story too. The flashy fantasy tropes are absent: this is a grounded, plausible narrative with a grand scope. It spans a lengthy time period - from the 1930's to the present - and deals with the serious questions and responsibilities of life in an artful style.

Every episode mixes together the grand narrative with careful depictions of rakugo performance itself, with a few of the classic rakugo stories recurring throughout different episodes, told by different characters in their own style. If that sounds a bit dull, ... don't be too dissuaded: the story prepares you so well for each performance that you aren't likely to feel bored. It uses these scenes not just to show a performance, but to build up context and character investment, and when it's not working on its characters, it builds up the world instead, depicting the various time periods with ruthless attention to detail. By the time you're done you'll feel a strong sense of the cultural shifts taking place over the years.

A way to view the two seasons, without spoiling any major details, is that S1 shows the tragic ending suggested by the title - a propelling of events to a sad, inevitable conclusion, and S2 shows a restoration: an "ending after the ending", continuing forward in time as the main characters grow old, face mortality, and eventually pass on, while a new generation comes up and challenges their elders(not in an overtly anti-authoritarian sense, but "we can try something different" - stark, duty-bound tradition giving way to new ideas). The two ends of this story meet in the late 1970's, and the timeline jumps around from that point, linking together common themes, stories, and characters in various surprising configurations.

There are many layers to the story, and yet there's always something to pick up on, so you hardly ever feel confused despite the complexity. It's visually interesting, and the audio breathes in a lot of atmosphere. It's very easy to recommend this series.

There are two things you should know about Kill la Kill:

1. It's a Trigger show - possibly THE Trigger show, given that it's their TV debut, and you should know what to expect: Flashy, extreme shifts in tone, dynamics, and animation style, in support of a narrative whose surface elements are full of incredulous nonsense, yet manage a lot of coherence when viewed for depth. Words like "zany" and "madcap" come to mind. This juggling act means that the story moves very quickly and fluidly, but most scenes also come out looking like rough caricatures, which makes it hard to focus on any one cut ... of animation as a high point. There are lots and lots of simple cuts that amount to "parallaxing still shots" or "3 frame loop against speed lines", and a much smaller number of traditionally beautiful action cuts. The art here is in how it's paced, not what is shown onscreen at any given moment.

2. The first half is harder to stomach than the second, because all it's doing in the early episodes is building up investment via a kind of character-of-the-week formula. Once the scenario is set up to satisfaction, it lets loose and unleashes a rollercoaster of twists and turns right up to the very end: Even if you can guess some of the major elements, there's sure to be something in here that takes you by surprise.

I would like to go back to the storytelling here. It's worth noting that KlK is in the much smaller category of "original TV anime", versus being an adaptation of a manga, LN, or game. Most such shows are rigid genre formula stories with minimal depth, lacking even in source material to lean on for ideas. Whatever else you might say about KlK, it definitely doesn't stick to formula. It has lots of conventional elements, but they're employed with a pace and style designed to feel different, often challenging the viewer: "Are you really okay with this kind of character being used in this unconventional way?" This also makes it a very polarizing work, more so even than the Trigger shows that look and feel more "normal" (e.g. Kiznaiver).

Perhaps more troublingly for the MAL viewer, the story is complex in its references, and not fully legible unless you know plenty about Japanese culture. As a character story, the internal logic holds up, but the motivations aren't always clear. You have to also recognize some of the broader themes and references to feel like it added up to something concrete, and I don't claim to have special insight here. One of the stronger basic frameworks I've read of is the story of Meiji Era industrialization and its resulting political changes. I give it a high score for being as ambitious as it is without being completely inaccessible to international audiences.

However, with that caveat in mind, I would recommend first watching a shorter, lower-investment show from Trigger such as Space Patrol Luluco or Inferno Cop. These preserve the same style and deliver their payoffs much faster, without the same issues of legibility.

It's hard to write about Kemono Friends because it doesn't easily compare to anything else airing in 2017. It wears a proud low-budget aesthetic, and has no sakuga cuts, being a CG-only show - there are plenty of still shots, mistimed or absent lip flaps, reused poses and cycles, and unfinished-looking backgrounds. The studio is an unknown, and so are the voice actors. Despite this it has the trappings of being a major franchise, with a huge cast of characters, a solid adventure/mystery plot, and tasteful application of moe, with the additional wrinkle of plotting that shares some lineage with American cartoons and movies as ... well as the anime/manga/light-novel sphere - Disney shows such as Gravity Falls or Ducktales come to mind as apt comparisons, or perhaps Spielbergian film such as E.T. or Jurassic Park.

If I had to pick one thing that defines the show, it's a "can-do" spirit of self-confidence permeating it, the kind of spirit I recall from 1970's-era anime. The characters are stereotypical in that their personality is approximately like watching videos of wild animals, but they aren't cynical, neither do they slot directly into the cliches common to comedy anime. And there are many, many characters to pick favorites from. It's all very sincere and upbeat, even as the plot and worldbuilding elements add a darker framing: Every interpersonal conflict has a happy end, here. The Friends are happy to meet each other. They help each other out.

The impoverished nature of the production also has a side-effect of adding dynamic range, in those moments where the camera actually moves or a unique animation is used. But it is all jarring at first, in the same ways that old, low-budget anime tends to be jarring. Plausibility concerns are often ignored in favor of getting a great moment. Judging by the popularity, it works for most people. Give it a few episodes to warm up.

Edit: Some additions after viewing the final episode. One of the stronger technical points of the series is the soundtrack. It's mostly fitting and at times, pretty exciting. The conclusion really hammers home the themes of friendship and learning, and it leaves a setup for future installments that leaves a few potential plot threads open, vastly expanding the scope of the world beyond Japari Park. And it bears repeating that there really isn't another show quite like this one.