God damn, woman, chill your shit. You're taking a shower, for Christ's sake.

A measure of maturity and a useful supporting cast.

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Copyright © 2011 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Hanasaku Iroha

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Despite all that happened between them, Ami and Minori still found a way to respect and support each other.

Romance is rife in anime, and why not… it’s a fascinating and ever relevant topic that anime has a decent track record with overall. Friendship, outside of romance (since romance innately implies friendship) isn’t a so frequently explored topic. But, it’s not hard to find examples of wonderful and genuine friendships between two or more people in anime. (This post contains moderate spoilers of the tagged titles.)

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Mai-HiME, Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakama-tachi, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, Toradora

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It's the busy review writing period, which is my half-assed excuse for not having posted anything on this blog for ages.

While everyone’s writing about the season that’s just started, I figured it’s a good time to go against the grain and look back at the season that just ended. Reviewing seasons is a completely different kettle of fish to reviewing a single series… there are multiple things to consider such as the number of “good” series (momentarily ignoring that there’s never a complete consensus about whether a given series is good or not), the variety on offer and whether the current trends are for the better or the worse. I don’t think there’s too much disagreement that Summer 2009 was last year’s best season (and arguably the best in anime for a long time), but in the wash-up, if our reviews are anything to go by, it was a season that had a lot of “good” titles, but only one “great” anime. (This post was originally going to be significantly longer, but I’ve split it into two parts. Arguably it weakens my argument, but it’s just much more manageable this way, and it’s not so blatantly tl;dr.)

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Bakemonogatari, Hidamari Sketch, Nodame Cantabile, Ouran High School Host Club, Spicy Wolf

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 38 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Azumanga Daioh, Gankutsuou, Gungrave, Honey and Clover, Koi Kaze, Millennium Actress, Monster, Mushishi, Now and Then Here and There

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Hence, this series of “decade’s” posts by The Nihon Review Staff. If there’s one commonality that links us, it’s that this past decade saw our interest in the medium surge as we began viewing not only the classics of old, but following the shows currently airing in Japan. And despite the deluge of anime we’ve seen, there are those that have made such a deep impression upon us that we cannot forget them.

So in following the footsteps blazed by gaguri, and wishing to join those who have put their thoughts forward, I present you my list of twenty titles that made an impact upon me in this past decade. TV shows tend to leave a stronger image in my mind, so I opted to focus on those. So with that, here’s my list. Dramatic execution demands that I start from the bottom and build up towards the top to create suspense. I’ve always hated that, and so, I’ll start from the top and work my way down. It’s always seemed more natural that way.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By zzeroparticle | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gankutsuou, Gunslinger Girl, Honey and Clover, Kino’s Journey, Monster, Mushishi, Nodame Cantabile, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

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Squandered opportunity, staring you in the face.

This morning, I was having  a rather pessimistic discussion with an Australian friend of mine over the future of the eroge industry. I ominously predicted that at the current rate, we could expect to see the death of eroge in about twenty years. This spilled over into a general conversation about the state of the anime industry, and the need for just about everyone to begin reconsidering what anime should be about.
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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Anime, Aria The Animation, ef -a tale of memories, Eroge, Moe, Mushishi, Spicy Wolf, Yamakan

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Not another blog post about Bakemonogatari.

It’s easy to complain. Fun too. But, equally important is being grateful. Obviously, this is easier said then done unless you have something to be grateful about, but I genuinely think that this season we, as anime fans, are spoiled for choice. It’s the calibre of anime which are on offer this season which reminds me why I became a fan to begin with. And those little reminders over the journey are necessary, especially if you’ve been in the game for a number of years. As an anime writer, it’s easy to become lost in the analysis and the details, to put the anime you watch and enjoy at arm’s length, which can make viewing them an unromantic experience. I mean, I still maintain that the onus is on the anime to provide you a reason to engage and to feel emotions while watching it… I’ll probably never move away from that viewpoint. But the idea that anime has the power to move you, to affect you in some way, to influence your thoughts and feelings… that’s a pretty amazing thing. And there have been a particularly large number of anime that have aired this season with that ability. (Minor spoilers for the tagged anime).

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aoi Hana, Aria The Animation, Bakemonogatari, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Ouran High School Host Club, Spicy Wolf, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

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In anime, moe is so rammed down our throats sometimes that it is easy to grow tired of it. It’s become a successful component in anime, to the point now that (to pull a number out of my ass) ~90% of anime use the moe art-style for character designs, but like all successful things, it has been abused and overused to the point where it’s use has become stale and unimaginative in a lot of instances, and even blatantly manufactured and manipulative in some of the worst cases (cf. the visual novel adaptations with an array of archetypes that you can check off on a list). Moe itself, though, is difficult to define (I don’t particularly subscribe to the Akamatsu definition) and we’ve basically been forced to go to an upper-upper-upper level to define it, calling it something akin to an art-style, which is sufficiently broad to encompass all things moe but tells you nothing about what makes it special or unique as a phenomenon. The challenge of defining moe in a meaningful way comes from the fact that it’s different things to different people, and I think most people have given up trying to come up with a definition that’s specific enough to describe it comprehensively, but general enough to encompass everything to do with the phenomonen. So, defining moe is a challenge (arguably) no one has completely succeeded at, now I’m going to attempt to define a subset of moe, something I refer to as “natural moe”.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Hidamari Sketch, Maria-sama ga Miteru, Natsume Yuujinchou, Sketchbook ~full color’S~

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Like I mentioned earlier, I (sadly) have more than a passing interest in these types of awards. The 2008 Tokyo Anime Fair Awards were just announced to, as far as I can see, reasonable disinterest. I can see the logic behind the choices behind these awards, even if I don’t particularly agree with all of them (in all honesty, I surprisingly haven’t seen most of the winners, so it’s hard for me to have an opinion either way). But as Kaioshin Sama from When Anime Past Meets Present puts it, if you don’t like the results of a given set of awards, why not make your own. But it’s not like I’m taking his advice (I’m starting to sound like a tsundere now), I’ve been playing with this idea for months.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Detroit Metal City, ef -a tale of memories, Kaiba, Kaiji, Kannagi, Kara no Kyoukai, KimiKiss pure rouge, Kurenai, Mouryou no Hako, Natsume Yuujinchou, Nodame Cantabile, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Shigofumi, Spicy Wolf, true tears, Yakushiji Ryouko no Kaiki Jikenbo - Ryoko’s Case File

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I’ll admit it, I do have more than just a passing interest in these types of awards. Obviously one affords as much credibility to a set of awards like these as one agrees with the results, and it always surprises me just how much people RAGE when they don’t, c.f. SaiMoe and its multiple incarnations. Then again, there’s more emotions involved in SaiMoe than there are in these.

This year’s list of nominations is a little more “credible” than last year’s, where, for whatever reason, titles like 5cm/s and Baccano! were snubbed in categories that they could have possibly won had they made it past the nomination round. There are a few titles here and there that I would have liked to have seen given nods, but for the most part they’ve captured the likely winners, which isn’t an all-too-easy thing to do in something that’s determined by an open popular vote. Anyway, this post is an attempt to predict the winners, which is much more challenging than just telling you who I think should win (but I’ll tell you that too ). Particularly with the AnimeSuki Forums, which is a real mix of varying tastes. I haven’t done any counting of the current votes, but I have flipped through the thread, so I have a (highly) vague idea of what people have been voting for at this stage.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 23 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Allison to Lillia, AnimeSuki Choice Awards, Aria The Animation, BAMBOO BLADE, Clannad, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Detroit Metal City, ef -a tale of memories, Gundam (all), Itazura na Kiss, Kaiba, Kaiji, Kannagi, Kanokon, Kara no Kyoukai, Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de, KimiKiss pure rouge, Kurenai, Macross Frontier, Mnemosyune Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi, Mouryou no Hako, Natsume Yuujinchou, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rosario + Vampire, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Shigofumi, Shion no Oh, Spicy Wolf, Strike Witches, To Love-Ru, true tears, Tsubasa Chronicle, Zero no Tsukaima

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