Here we have a series that hits pretty much every one of my buttons: an anime steeped in gothic aesthetics, themes about identity and perception, visual design that makes heavy use of dark silhouettes against vivid colors, and homoerotic mirror imagery.
ReSTART is a mostly newbie-friendly reboot of a 1990s series with good energy and strong yuri subtext… but my God, this show is obsessed with ass shots.
It’s not that the whole episode is a waste of time, although in some ways that’s more frustrating than if it was a complete ball of incompetence. It’s just that some pretty novel ideas are buried in a sea of titties and tonal inconsistency.
While there are some bumpy spots that keep this from being an inclusively horny ray of personified sunshine, I did spend most of the episode with a slightly baffled grin.
Burning Kabaddi seems crafted entirely to combat the sport’s status as a punchline in Japanese media, going so far as to have Yoigoshi call out the trend before he’s inevitably sucked in. This, my friends, is an imaging campaign.
A quiet, not-quite pretentious historical horror drama that is extremely My Brand.
While Kill la Kill was all about clothes and the way commodification objectifies bodies, it missed the opportunity to talk about the rich history of rebellion using fashion. And moreover, it failed to interrogate the real villains running the show.
It’s familiar, like Gurren Lagann meets Escaflowne—but familiar doesn’t have to mean bad.
I’ll tip my hat to this first episode: using the overworked cells of a failing body as a vehicle to tell a story about workers being crushed beneath the heel of capitalism is a solid choice.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it probably wouldn’t have taken me six hours to watch this premiere if it hadn’t come out on the same day as an attempted coup, but I also can’t reliably tell you how much of that time was “anxious distracted doomscrolling” and how much was “if they throw any more technobabble into this toy commercial, I will gouge my eardrums out with my headphones.”
Yuri! And it’s sci-fi! And they’re adults! I KNOW!
I’ll give Boonies this: when three of the five named female characters end up showing some level of romantic interest in Lloyd in this premiere, at least I get it. He’s a sweet kid, even if he is a narrative black hole.
Once again I am faced with a title that should be extremely relevant to my interests—in this case, a lesbian vampire romance with a pretentious artsy streak—only to trash 90% of my built-in goodwill with fumbled execution.
I do sincerely think Skate-Leading Stars is at least trying to do its own thing, and by the end of this first episode it had convinced me to hear it out for two more.
Paradise Kiss is one of the great josei manga classics, but subsequent versions of the story erode the focus on its lead’s agency that make the original so special, serving as a prime example of how different framings can tell the same plot and lose all of the effectiveness.
While it has the most generic Fantasy Oppression setting imaginable, the very emphatically capitalized MAGATSU WAHRHEIT knows exactly how it looks—and it’s unexpectedly sly at playing with those expectations.
It took me two days and no less than four separate attempts to make it all the way through Maesetsu’s 24-minute first episode.
When the writing is willing to shut up and breathe, it unearths a kind of camaraderie in the face of despair that I have no doubt it plans to return to. Unfortunately, those two minutes are preceded by 20 minutes of noise.
Apparently the market for manhwa adaptations is considered unreliable enough that we are now here, staring down the barrel of a 2020 anime based on a series that began running in 2007 (and was in fact, the first Webtoon title translated into English) and feels every inch its age.
Yes, Moriarty the Patriot is terribly competent, and that is its greatest failing.
