Kimikiss wants to be a moving drama about high schoolers discovering romance. It is set in the real world, so there are no fight scenes, magical events, or characters who revolve entirely around some unrealistic aspect of the setting. Those things aren’t necessary because high school romance is complicated by its very nature, as people [...]
Asatte no Houkou is, at its heart, a fairytale. It conforms perfectly to the classical structure: a normal person leads a normal life. A single act of magic grants a well-intentioned but poorly-worded wish. This creates confusion and distress for the wisher and all around her, but everyone eventually adapts to the new situation. Finally, [...]
Sometimes when writing reviews for anime I feel like a sommelier gone rogue: anime has exactly the same style of jargon. There are the broad classifications that everyone who is not blind can tell the first time they encounter an example, and there are the fine distinctions with weird, non-intuitive names which can only be [...]
This series is about a girl on summer vacation working as an intern. The only thing, really, that makes this unusual is the nature of her profession: she is practicing to become a professional mage.
Magic is a regulated profession illegal to practice without a license, like medicine or law. It is is a natural ability [...]
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei means, approximately, “Goodbye Mr. Despair.” The concluding line of the initial episode summarizes this series as well as anything: a man who sees in life only despair meets a girl who sees only hope. Only, this series isn’t really about her, except when she’s needed to foil the incessant gloominess of the [...]
The previous review was insufficient. It read as follows:
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The Charcoal Wings Foundation is an association of apparantly angelic people, living a life within a large walled area including a small city and enough farmland to support it. It’s all about self-discovery and the inner conflicts within people. What is a good person, anyway?
I’m pretty sure [...]
Nodame Cantabile is fundamentally an exploration of the qualities that a person needs to rise to the very top of a competitive field. Ultimately, it requires both natural talent and intensely devoted hard work, but is the payoff of being the best worth the personal penalties associated with such obsessive attention? Might it not be [...]
Hataraki Man.
One problem with becoming an expert in any field is that one becomes excruciatingly familiar with all the conventions and expectations of the field. In an information field like anime, a connoisseur quickly gets bored with the normal and the familiar. All a series needs to do to make such a person give all [...]
Ouran Private Academy is defined by three attributes: prestigious families, wealth, and prosperous students with too much free time on their hands. The Ouran Host Club is therefore about handsome guys giving hospitality to lovely ladies, and profiting by the transaction.
Imagine, if you will, every bad stereotype of shoujo manga and anime. A calculating financial [...]
Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl who Jumps Through Time)
This movie is cute. It’s got appealing art, engaging characters, and a nice story. It’s not science fiction; it’s a high-school romance in which the main character happens to gain the ability to travel through time. It avoids stereotypes, both of high school and of time [...]