I don’t think I’d call it a secret “masterpiece,” but it is surprisingly good - much better than it seems like it should be, given the tropish concept.

Ooh… this should be interesting.

Great episode - Ponko is awesome. The “don’t be the prey” scene was especially good.

The Nudel was a bit too similar to the Graboids from Tremors for it to be an accident.

And Yachiyo got the “pretty voice” reward, so maybe the OP will evolve?

Tawawa on Monday

I bounced off of this one a few weeks ago. I liked the first episode and (what I thought was);the overall concept, but when the next episode introduced a different female lead who was immediately mostly defined by large bouncy breasts, I was a bit disconcerted, and then when I skipped ahead and sampled some of the other episodes, all apparently featuring different women, all defined by large bouncy breasts, I lost interest.

I’ll have to give it another shot though. It’s not that I dislike large bouncy breasts, but that I tend to assume that when they make such an early and prominent appearance, there’s not going to be much else of note.

Mmm… I can sort of see that. There are some impressive special effects that accompany the future technology that were likely dazzling for the time. And the CGI for the backgrounds likely was state of the art (and certainly better than, for example, Initial D).

Still though - the character animation seems pretty poor regardless of age, and the contrast of rough, fuzzy character art with simple, rigid, entirely rectilinear CGI backdrops is distracting.

All that said though, I don’t want to focus on the art too much. It’s a thing I noticed, so I mentioned it, but more to the point, the story is very good and intriguing and (so far) well plotted and paced, and the characters are well developed, and I’ll forgive pretty much anything for a good story with good characters.

I’m really looking forward to this. I love the manga, and I can’t wait to actually hear a Wada rant. And some of the manga scenes are going to be epic if they’re done well in the anime. I’m especially thinking of the “what to do if you’re attacked by a wild animal” scene, since it relies on slowly building tension and excitement capped by perfect comedic timing.

Started off the week with Gabriel Dropout, which is a barrel of fun. The basic setup is that in order to qualify as full-fledged angels or demons (as the case might be), angels/demons in training have to spend some time on Earth, which is how we end up with two angels and two demons making up the foursome for a CGDCT screwball comedy slice of school life. I liked it all the way through - good characters (none of them are particularly good at what they’re supposed to be), laugh out loud humor, nice artstyle. It’s not quite to YuruYuri or Lucky Star quality, but was well worth it.

Then, craving a bit more screwball comedy, I went back to a long-time guilty pleasure and rewatched Photon aka Photon: The Idiot Adventures. It’s a sort of sci-fi adventure story set on a far distant future Earth with a straightforward comedy hook - every single major character is an idiot of one sort or another. And in fact, their entire sort of quasi-mystical technology is based on “aho energy” - idiot energy. It’s not great by any means, but it’s good idiotic fun.

Then I sort of steeled my resolve and dove into one that I dropped after a couple of episodes about a year ago, because I could see it was going to be a rough ride, and at the time I wasn’t ready to invest as much energy and attention as it was going to demand - Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the 24 episode run, and it has been very dense and dramatic, and very good. It’s a sort of Evangelion knock-off insofar as it’s in part a complex and vague science fiction/superpower war allegory on coming of age, but without the religious claptrap - it’s instead all built around quantum physics and multiverse theory. The only real downside to it is that the animation is frankly terrible - an awful combination of cheap fuzzy hand drawn and cheap low poly CGI. But the characters and the story make it worth it.

I’m okay with that. It feels a bit too rushed and incomplete and open to be really satisfying as an ending in and of itself, but it works overall, and effectively says, “Now go read the LN.”

That sounds rough

Curiously, it was the previous chapter that really hit me, because my dad was like Naruto’s mom, except that he alternated presuming my inevitable failure with haranguing me for not trying.

On a broader note, this series impresses the hell out of me. Who would’ve expected early on that it was going to turn out to be so emotionally complex?

Not quite either one, or maybe a bit of both.

Kasane Teto is a virtual singer, using a piece of software called Utau.

Briefly, the way it works is a human voice is recorded making every possible phoneme, then each phoneme is keyed separately in the program, so an end user can put together strings of phonemes to form words and phrases, and by adjusting their pitch and timbre and tempo and so on can make them into songs.

So it started with a human voice, but it’s all computer generated.

Hopefully that’s all, and she’s gotten the message that he definitely is trustworthy (even Grieja is trying to bring her around).

I was just wondering, because it seemed like such a cliffhanger, if there was some reason she literally couldn’t tell him - like revealing the secret would break the spell - and I just didn’t remember that part.

I can’t remember - is there a reason for her to not tell him?

Yes - Kaede is fully aware of and embarrassed by the prospect of “various things.”

I count that as progress

Well, we finally met the tanuki family. I liked it all in all, and now Yachiyo has an assistant, and I assume the whole family is going to stick around. And Yachiyo passed a second mission - I’m assuming there’s an overarching plot involving those.

Interesting that this episode was set 50 years after the last one.

I’ve been resisting wjs018’s predictions of mood whiplash in this series just because I’d rather it not, but then they went ahead and threw a mostly implied bit in with the human ship, then made it explicit in the post-credits scene. Ah well.

The OP is still oddly clunky, but it still makes me smile anyway.

I love ARIA. To me, it’s the perfect iyashikei - it’s just beautiful snd calm, and Akari’s entire purpose in life is to share happiness. And Alicia is the archetype ara ara onee-san.

The only series I’m following so far this season is Apocalypse Hotel. Last week’s episode was fine all in all, but it did an odd thing. They showed the OP for the first time, and it was uncomfortably dissonant - both downbeat and off-key, and ultimately sort of dirge-like. But it was disconcerting enough that it has to have neen deliberate, and it sort of fits, because at the point we picked up the story, both the hotel and the MC have just about run their course, and have just at this late stage found a glimmer of hope. So I suspect that as their fortunes improve, the OP is going to evolve to reflect it. Or at least I hope so, since that would be awesome, and without something like that, the OP will just remain inexplicably awkward.

As far as day-to-day viewing goes, I started off the week with season 1 of Baka to Test. It was fine but sort of oddly dull. I’m not quite sure how it managed that, since all of the individual parts seem like they should add up to more than that. The setup’s interesting and the characters are relatively well developed and the art style is intriguing and it’s consistently funny, but it still somehow manages to be sort of drab all in all. The subs were sort of meta-amusing though - very much “localized,” and by era as well as place.

Then after a bit of wandering, I watched Saekano Or more precisely, I watched half of Saekano, then dropped it. It was strange - the “boring girlfriend” of the title was the only engaging character in the whole cast. She’s intriguing and distinctive and very much her own character, while all of the rest are just awkward conglomerations of tropes that aren’t even internally coherent. I never got a sense of any of them as distinct, recognizable individuals - they were just sort of blank ciphers assigned some combination of stereotypes - and their actions never seemed to spin off from their characters, but to just be whatever was necessary to move the plot along. And most notably, the qualities and actions assigned to the MMC tended to be tedious, insufferable and obnoxious, in addition to arbitrary, which is most of what led me to drop it.

Then I ended up on something only sort of anime-adjacent - Pantheon - which was excellent and highly recommended, but not technically anime, so I guess I’ll leave it at that.

Madoka.

One of the creepier manifestations of his profound mental illness.

As I just noted in another response, I immediately heard the OP as an overly earnest and depression-prone robot a century out from human contact letting go, to the best of her very limited ability. I thought it was brilliant.

ETA: The more I think sbout it, there are two notable things about that OP - the song was both down tempo and off-key, and a number of her dance moves actually required a partner.

How awesome would it be if, by the end of the season, the song was sweet and light and she had a partner?

I loved the OP.

What I heard, clear as a bell, was an overly earnest and depression-prone robot who’'s one of the few remaining who hasn’t ended up on the scrap heap, and is gamely and determinedly keeping a luxury hotel not only running but luxurious a century after humanity left the planet letting go, just a little bit, with a song that’s more upbeat than she is. For now.