This warms my heart, but I hate to think what's going to happen to Charlotte.

I know the favourite retort of Scamp, from The Cart Driver, right now is “it gets better, I swear” as a way to dismiss any claims that his criticism of a given series that has either previously aired or is an adaptation are shortsighted. The problem with this as a counter-criticism is that “it gets better” is actually legitimate more often than he’d like to admit. Scamp and I vary drastically as far as our policies on dropping anime go. He’ll generally trial the first episode of everything except the most obvious of garbage, while I only drop anime out of utter despair, and am more than willing to tolerate dreck once in a while (whatever doesn’t kill you, etc). Back in the day, I too would try a swathe of new shows at the outset of the season, but even then I considered dropping an anime akin to surrender. These days, I’m a bit more finicky and discriminating with my first up choices, and inclined to listen to reviews about what I’ve missed. (This post contains moderate spoilers for the tagged titles.)

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Copyright © 2011 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 34 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Mai-HiME, Moshidora

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One of my favourite Japanese movies is a film by former comedian, now actor/director, Kitano Takeshi, entitled Hana-bi. Hana-bi is a gritty, minimalist cop drama about a broken down detective who takes revenge on the yakuza while his wife dies from leukemia. Hana-bi is, in my opinion, the best of Kitano’s minimalist crime dramas that he made in the ’90s, and the difference in tone between them and the manzai comedy he did at the beginning of his career, when he performed with the stage name “Beat Takeshi”, is the size of a chasm. I find Kitano an absolutely fascinating and creative human being: many of the ideas in Hana-bi‘s script were inspired by a near fatal motorcycle accident Kitano was involved in, and his subsequent rehabilitation. In his career, he’s done slapstick comedy, morose yakuza thrillers, sex comedies, sword fighting historical set pieces, romance fantasies, coming-of-age stories, cop movies, etc. The range in incredible. He once said in an interview that he never wants to be pigeonholed. I daresay he’s on track. (This post contains major spoilers for the tagged titles.)

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Copyright © 2011 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Claymore, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Hana-bi, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

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In a recent article published on We Remember Love, Pontifus considered the confusing contradictions that appear throughout Ookami-san and pondered whether they indicated a statement on moe, or perhaps even a meta-reaction to it. He took it one step further by bringing up the question of whether a moe in conflict with itself (as appears in Ookami-san) is sustainable, and likened the moe genre as a whole to a dodongo who’d just swallowed a bomb. Art movements, as he rightly pointed out, don’t explode though… they shift. The most important question he asked dealt with the future of moe, and he speculated that moe might go through something of an upheaval… maybe now, maybe not til five years time.

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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: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakama-tachi, Post-Modernism, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

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This is happening a lot quicker than it did last year. This time last year there was a massive gap between the end of nominations and voting, which didn’t start until the 25th of Jan. This year, voting is going to be over before the 20th. Personally, I think it was better the way Kyomi did it last year (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was a consequence of him being lackadaisical)… well, not the massive gap between nominations and voting, but the fact that voting didn’t start until late in the month. It gives more people time to catch up and to stew over the anime they’ve seen in the last year. Some of the nominees haven’t even been completely subbed (to my knowledge and conveniently ignoring Crunchyroll), while, in my book, Bakemonogatari (which is going to absolutely clean up these awards) is still technically ongoing.

This year’s nominees are reasonable enough again. I can’t think of too many blatant exclusions (except for one which I’ll get to later). In all honesty, I’m actually less concerned with what wins than I am what gets nominated. Winning is, a lot of the time, about splitting hairs. Being nominated means that an anime has actually been recognized by a reasonably sized audience for excelling at something. 5 cm/s missing a nomination for the animation category two years ago still sticks in my mind. I’m not sure what was going through everyone’s mind during the nomination process (myself included, since I also forgot to nominate it). Since then, forum goers have been much more careful during nomination. I like to think AnimeSuki has learned its lesson.

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: AnimeSuki Choice Awards, Bakemonogatari, Clannad, Eden of the East, Eve no Jikan, Gundam (all), Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, K-ON!, Kampfer, Kara no Kyoukai, Kemono no Souja Erin, Natsume Yuujinchou, Saki, Spicy Wolf, Taishou Yakyuu Musume, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

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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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It’s an overblown question because the answer is almost certainly “no”. Nor do I mean to imply that Higurashi is the best moe anime ever made, because there’s probably an anime franchise called “ARIA” which lays a better claim to that (and then there are all the anime that are only considered partly moe). But what I want to consider in this post is the use of moe, since I’m not sure there’s an anime which has taken advantage of the aesthetic to a practical end quite like Higurashi has. There have been a lot of anime which have used moe as a mostly superficial hook, and with its increasing prominence comes a more vocal group to question its utility. Higurashi strikes me as high among the best examples to answer the critics of moe’s usefulness. This post contains moderate spoilers of Higurashi.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

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