Anime Review: Flying Witch

Flying Witch

Anime Review: Tanaka-kun is Always Listless

Before the spring season, Tanaka-kun was a maybe on my list, then it went off my list, and then it went back on my list after I saw people still talking about it a few episodes in. The three episode rule is a great guideline guys, if you still see other people talking about a show after three episodes then by golly, then you gotta check it out at that point!

Tanaka-kun is Always Listless (Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge)

Manga Review: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou (volume one)

This review originally appeared on OASG

Title: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou

Genre: Slice of Life

Publisher: Shonen Gahosha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)

Story/Artist: Ruri Miyahara

Serialized in: Young King Ours

Reviewed: Volume 1 of 6

Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

As I mentioned last time, there are many different kinds of slice of life manga out there. Some rely on character growth to move the story along and others use the passage of time to keep the story flowing. Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou, which was adapted into an anime titled The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior, doesn’t use either of those methods and in this first volume it’s hard to believe that any time is passing at all since nothing in the story seems to change.

Manga Review: Joshi Kausei

This review originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses

Title: Joushi Kausei
Genre: Slice of Life
Publisher: Futabasha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Story/Artist: Ken Wakai
Serialized in: Manga Action
Reviewed: 15 out of 26 chapters
Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

These days savvy anime and manga fans will be fairly familiar with the slice of life genre and the various subgenres in it. Everyday school stories, cute girls doing cute things, and workplace comedies, among others, all fall into the category along with another where the name isn’t as familiar but the premise is, iyashikei or “healing” stories. While they don’t possess any medicinal value, these stories are sweet, simple tales where you simply feel uplifted and happier after reading one and that is precisely the point of Joshi Kausei. This simple, wordless manga (although it does include text and sound effects) follows Momoko through various scenes in her everyday life and these stories aren’t connected by either plot or even character development. The idea is for the reader to relax, smile, and enjoy it.

TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME 2015: Anthem of the Heart

Alright folks, it's the start of 12 Days of Anime so have a late movie review post (which works out well for me since I'm not sure I have 12 days worth of material yet....)

I almost didn't see this movie, it was playing only for two days near me (a simultaneous release with the rest of the US so there weren't any advance reviews), tickets are expensive, and while I liked the 30 minute making-of feature it just didn't sell me on it (it has a lot of the same team that worked on AnoHana and while I did like that show it was so melodramatic I wasn't sure I could handle all of that compressed into a single movie). Thankfully some folks started writing reviews on it after they saw it on the first day and that pushed me to go you know, why not? 

Anthem of the Heart

Anime Review: Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine

At some point I will get back on track with this blog, I've just been distracted and tired a lot lately. So let me keep this short and get to the meat of the post, Knights of Sidonia is back and I couldn't be more thrilled about it.

Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine

Movie Review: Mai Mai Miracle

No post yesterday because I had a headache that could split mountains and quite predictably those make my writing rather incoherent, even for a shorter post like this one. But I think a day's delay for this review is fine since once again almost no one else has talked about it! I'm not sure how the JICC scored a viewing copy of the movie before the Kickstarter DVDs had released (in fact I'm not sure if they're out yet, given that the KS updates are backers only and the last update was in late July) but this wouldn't be the first time they have showed a movie that doesn't have a physical media release in the US.

Mai Mai Miracle

Anime Review: Sound! Euphonium

This show wasn't even on my radar when the spring season started and now it's a lock for my top anime of the year list. It's funny, so far it's felt like a weak year (although fall looks amazing so far) since there haven't been as many shows that I want to watch but for the shows I am watching so many of them have ended up being ridiculously strong. Now to pray that the PonyCan release isn't ridiculously expensive....

Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium)

Webcomic Review: Wasted Talent

Funny enough, this is a Webcomic Thursday instead of a Webcomic Wednesday because I finally got a new computer and spent an hour transferring over my webcomics! The bookmarks came over as part of Chrome but I didn't realize the RSS feeds for my add-on wouldn't, it wasn't the most tedious task ever but that's because I have done the most tedious tasks in the world recently so the bar is pretty high for me. 

Wasted Talent by Angela Melick

Webcomic Review: Girls With Slingshots

Well this wasn't the original plan but since the comic did end just last week it's perfect timing for me! If you follow the RSS feed the comic is now repeating with it's very earliest strips (but now in color) and holy cow I didn't even remember that the art was so different at first, so if anyone else is looking at the front page for the first time in a while and is confused that would be why, it's not your memory it's actually the comic!

Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto

Manga Review: Orange

As an aside, this review was supposed to go up on OASG first but is going up here first. This only matters since I did read this manga using the press account with Crunchyroll so "a review copy was provided". This won't apply to my other two manga titles this month however, I read both of those thanks to many guest passes from friends!

I went to the Crunchyroll Manga panel at Katsucon a few weeks back (and ran out of the room to take a phone call AND ended up sitting next to some other people from "Anitwitter") where Dancia and Evan spent part of the panel talking about some of the manga they personally liked. Orange was brought up and Danica said something to the effect of "the Japanese editors had no idea people were even reading it overseas since they didn't think it would appeal to anyone else". That made me giggle a bit since a few months earlier I had mentioned in passing that I hadn't read it yet and wanted to I immediately had friends offering me guest passes for the express purpose for reading the series. I am sure that that the editors are completely correct that the overseas fanbase is small but at least it's a dedicated one!

Orange by Ichigo Takano

Movie Review: Letter to Momo

I went in completely blind for this film, I knew nothing about the premise other than it was a family film, wasn't familiar with the director, and I thought I had a friend who really liked the movie but even that wasn't true! It's unusual for me to go that blind into a film or anime these days, even more obscure titles I tend to watch because someone specifically recommended it, and it can be fun to go into something completely blind if it turns out good!

Letter to Momo

Anime Review: Mushi-shi: The Next Passage (part two)

Happy New Year guys, may my posts be much more timely this year! Although I could have put up this review on Monday, if I wanted to forgo watching the last Mushi-shi episode. As everyone knows by now, Crunchyroll has been having some trouble lately, recently they announced they were the victim of a DDoS attack and I suspect that's why both their website and apps have been giving everyone trouble for about a month now. There have been a few days where I haven't been able to get my phone's app to work at all during work and that's the only time I have for watching anime and since Mushi-shi has been so consistently great I did consider just writing up this review and amending it after I saw the last episode. But that didn't sit right with me and it did end on one of it's best episodes, fingers crossed that I also find more time for anime watching in this new year as well!

Mushi-shi: The Next Passage (part two)

Webcomic Review: The Littlest Elle

Initially I was going to hold off on changing how I did webcomic reviews until the new year but what the heck, I'll talk about it more in my end of year round-up post in about a month but I've decided that I'm going to start doing reviews of completed webcomics I follow as if they were a comic or manga series (even if I reviewed them while they were still on-going since I've done that for manga as well). Of course, this series actually ended months back and I was waffling on whether or not to start doing these reviews now but I have a bit of a lull in my schedule and this artist does have a few other active projects so I'd like to highlight one that she's done to help get people interested in the ones she's still working on (I'm also impressed at anyone who manages to work on three separate webcomics at once, no matter what the update schedule is!)

The Littlest Elle by Elle Skinner

Comic Review: Hana Doki Kira

I waffled over reviewing this anthology or not since I don't want to be excessively mean-spirited to a fan project and I know that it's highly unlikely that the creators of these stories will see this review and then keep it in mind the next time they plan something (like you would for a critique). And yet, this was a project I had high hopes for and this book really just didn't pan out for me and I would like to articulate precisely why this was since I do think these are correctable mistakes and not all of them are the fault of the artists.

Hana Doki Kira

Anime Review: One Week Friends

Several years ago I would have jumped on this show as soon as it started, now however I've grown cynical. Not of heartwarming stories, thank goodness, but of the ability of people to tell a heartwarming story without it becoming overly sugary or veering unexpectedly dark to make other parts seem lighter. Or just writing complicated, nuanced characters, so in short, I waited until I saw people giving this show good reviews week after week before I took the plunge and did not let the cute visuals tempt me into doing so earlier!

One Week Friends (Isshuukan Friends)

Anime Review: Silver Spoon

There seem to be two reactions to this show, complete love for it (coupled with loudly wondering why the manga isn't licensed yet) and simply not being aware it exists. I fall into the former category (well, I understand why the manga isn't licensed) and I'm a bit sad that the buzz for this series seems to have died off by the time this second half started. I've seen people explain it as "if you know something is going to be good you're less surprised when it turns out well" but still, I think when anything is do consistently good that it should be talked about even more, even if it's not good in a flashy sort of way. 

Silver Spoon

Anime Review: Inari Kon Kon

Moving right along with my just-ended anime reviews, this is actually the show I had the most hopes for come winter since I had checked out some of the original manga and found it to be adorable as heck, although the ten episode length did worry me. I'm also worried it didn't get the attention it should have since it aired rather late (and, since it was on Funimation's website, it was another week before most people could see it) so I'm here now to tell you guys why you should check out one of the genuinely sweetest anime I've seen in a few seasons.

Inari Kon Kon Koi Iroha

Anime Review: Mushi-shi

This has been on my to-watch list for years, since early college at least but since legal streaming was in it's infant stages back in 2009 by the time it was online (subbed) legally there was a whole slew of new, more colorful and exciting shows also to watch so it fell by the wayside for me. When news that there was going to be a new OVA came out I remembered I hadn't seen it yet and, since a lot of people were speculating this would lead to a second season (even though the first one came out 8 years earlier, that's a hell of a gap) I started working out my schedule to see it and yep, a new season was announced and I had only two-ish months to finish this first. I would have gotten this review up back in February actually but in February I fell into a bit of a slump and needed something a bit more distracting, more escapist to watch so here I am now, a bit belatedly, telling you to watch a show whose sequel has already started.

Mushi-shi

In this world there are things that everyone can see and other things which are only seen by a few. Those are the mushi and they intertwine and interfere with the lives of people around them regardless of who they are. And so there are the mushi-shi, people who try to solve the problems they cause and Ginko is one man whose entire life revolves around this.

Mushi-shi is not the easiest anime to talk about for all I enjoyed it, that's often how the best slice of life stories are. It's simple but not quite sweet, rough without being uncaring in a way that mimics life. This isn't the kind of supernatural stories that are popular on television, where there has been a great wrong and something is getting revenge, more often than not these stories start with an accident, although a few get worse from there. Very few of the stories are interconnected which makes it even harder to talk about the story since there aren't any great character arcs or overarching plots to discuss, although that does make the nods in the OVA to all of the first season's stories even sweeter. No, Mushi-shi hangs together in a strange way where it's connected more through themes and general tone than anything else and, since it's hard to express the whys and hows it works let me state up front that it absolutely works here. 

The show is all about its' atmosphere yet calling it atmospheric would probably give people the wrong impression. It's not dark, moody, gothic or any of those things yet it's art, music, and the stories themselves combine together to create something that goes beyond just tone and that feeling it makes defines the show itself. The show really isn't about Ginko, the titular mushi-shi, especially since while he appears in every episode sometimes he's just a very minor character, helping out another person whose already solved most of their problems already. Sometimes he is the main character and his background isn't a secret to the viewer for very long and yet the mixture of his sometimes calm demeanor and other times complete bafflement isn't the main draw of the show. It's the stories themselves that will either bring the viewers in or drive them out, it's a show you'll either love to pieces or be bored to tears by.


One problem I did have with the show's lack of connections was that sometimes it was hard to motivate myself to watch another episode, even if I really did enjoy the show. If had months and months to watch it that wouldn't have been a problem but since I was trying to not only watch it but talk about it before the new season aired I was a bit constrained and there were just some nights where I instead watched something with a lot of character drama or an over-arching story that grabbed me and made me want more of the story right this moment instead of wanting to see more sometime next week. And for that reason I can say that this show isn't for everyone, it isn't that the pacing is slow (especially since, if I'm remembering correctly, there's not a single two-parter in the entire season) but that it doesn't have quite that draw that nearly every other series out there has, even other "gentle" supernatural stories like Natsume and the Book of Friends which has a sizable cast of reoccurring characters just pulled me in a bit more. Considering how closely this ties into the tone of the story I imagine this was a deliberate, or at least expected, side-effect so I can't fault the story for poor construction here, it's just different.   



The art in Mushi-shi is very simple, to the point where I wondered if certain characters had shown up before since they looked so similar (funny enough the reoccurring characters have the most distinct appearances so I shouldn't have worried about that). The mushi look a bit more distinct but if you asked me to describe what ones from a certain episode looked like I wouldn't be able too. Just like the people, the mushi are all different but drawn in a very limited style so they all end up looking similar, quite honestly what stood out to me the most about the art were the backgrounds and the particularly lovely and haunting way the often present mountains were drawn, they reminded me quite a bit of sumi-e paintings. The opening and ending are even more limited in looks than the rest of the show, the opening is just a repeated motif of leaves rustling and each episode ends with the credits crawling over a black screen (with a different song each episode). And for those curious, yes the opening song is an English song and you can buy it on iTunes, although I must warn you that the second verse wasn't what I expected.

And for those who want to give the series a shot, the entire first season is streaming on hulu (subbed and dubbed) courtesy of Funimation. However Aniplex has picked up the just started second season (and presumably the OVA that came out earlier in 2014) and those episodes can be watched on crunchyroll instead.

      

Webcomic Review: The Littlest Elle

The Littlest Elle by Elle Skinner

The life and times of Elle Skinner, cartoonist and devoted cat lover.

I'm really not sure why I didn't try this comic sooner, especially since I like Elle Skinner's other comics (Missing Monday and the collaborative Erstwhile, both of which I've talked about in years past) and this is another mostly-autobiographical, slice of comic which I is a genre I clearly adore. Elle Skinner's art is always on the sketchier side but compared to her other two comics (and especially this one in Erstwhile) these comics look a bit rough which I think is what initially turned me off. However the punchlines are fantastic and often when the comic ends on a more serious note it feels like it's getting across a rather sweet, important message. I remembered one of her comics which said that, as an introvert, at conventions she just does her best to pretend to be an extrovert which I really took to heart and try to do in situations like those (and clearly it works since when I met her at SPX she was really outgoing and friendly!). It is a bit long but the beauty of comics like these is that you can easily start reading them and then catch up when you have a chance later on and I speak from experience when I say that it's amusing but not repetitious when marathoned. So add this to your list of slice of life comics to check out and try out her other ones too!