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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The previous review was incomplete. It read as follows: —– There is a man with a gift. He can see the weakest point of everything: with his knife, he can destroy anything. This is unnatural and creepy to him. He eventually makes friends with a vampire, and they fall in love, and everything works out [...]
The previous review was insufficient. It appears below in its entirety: —— This one is considered a classic by a lot of people. It certainly has its moments of excellence, but in the end, I didn’t end up liking it as much as I could have. It couldn’t decide whether it wanted to focus on [...]
Blue Submarine #6 is a short series taking place after a global cataclysm. A mad scientist has melted the polar ice caps, raising the sea level to the point where most of the world’s surface is now ocean. This had the unfortunate side effect of killing most of humanity, so he took the precaution of [...]
Lucky Star: The first bits you notice are the worst. The incredibly stylized, cutesy animation; the stratospheric octaves of the voices of the main characters; the 85% female cast; none of these tend to be associated with a quality series. In many ways, the series /isn’t/ quality; there are a ton of references to the [...]
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is the story of a girl aghast at the thought of living in any mundane reality. Luckily for her, she happens to be the incarnation of some godlike force shaping the universe–not that she’s aware of that fact–so the universe bends to provide her with an alien, a time-traveller, and [...]
The original review was insufficient. It read as follows: —– Persocons are humanoid robots which act essentially as massive, lovable PDAs. Chii is a Persocon discovered by Motosawa Hideki, who happens to be one result of the legendary Chobits project: an effort to imbue persocons with true emotion and intelligence. Not so ecchi as first [...]