Hromino

Much has been said and written about Madoka Magica’s excellence and its uniqueness, and how Urobucchi managed to deconstruct the magical girl subgenre, and I cannot disagree with any of this. Stories of cute, sweet, girls endowed with magical powers usually have only a limited audience, so the above-mentioned gentleman decided to turn it into a psychological thriller with the addition of a small amount of GL. The result is great: the mood swings in the story are masterfully done, the character designs and the level of animation are magnificent, and Kajiura's soundtrack proves here just how well it suits anime led by female characters. Only two things were bad. The first was the fact that the series was animated by SHAFT, so their proverbial propensity for visual self-indulgence, and a desperate attempt to prove themselves to the audience with how "we are terribly original, and do everything differently, not like the others". Unfortunately, this showing off is at the expense of real entertainment. The fight scenes with the witches may have a cool effect as art on someone, but it seemed to be more like a sloppy mess to me, during which they simply tried to use them in order to shock people which perhaps worked once, but after that people were already bored when it was repeated. The second thing is the anti-climax. In essence, the season peaks at the 9th episode, after which the remaining three episodes are just an effort to repeat all the elements of previous episodes together and turn back a seemingly irreversible fate, and heal everyone’s pains in the style of Steins;Gate. As with the above, the last few episodes are not bad in themselves, they just did not grab my attention as much as the previous episodes. Despite these criticisms, however, it is a unique experience that I recommend without exception to any anime lover. I give it a strong 4 stars. –– P.S. I suspect that in 2011 Urobuchi signed a contract with a purple chinchilla and became a screenwriter with magical powers. How else could we explain how between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, when he managed to create three essential, unmistakable works (Fate/Zero, Psycho-Pass, and this), which other screenwriters can not manage making in a lifetime, and then it is as if he suddenly vanished into thin air…

When talking about music, people use the term “one-hit-wonder”, which makes me recall a whole host of artists, however, when this connection is used with anime, Trigger is the first studio that comes to mind. They peaked with Gurren Lagann, which was a creative marriage between the people behind Trigger under the banner of yet another studio, and since then, I have been witnessing their decline as they have attempted better that work by simply constantly churning out the same old animation and narrative techniques because they are still under the shadow of Gurren Lagann. The productions creeping out from the studio that is to blame are either purely average (Little Witch Academia), or clearly below average works (Kill la Kill, When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, Kiznaiver). Attempting to create and maintain your own style may be nice in itself, but at the same time, it also needs to be capable of being updated, breaking new ground, moving forward, and experimenting, and not just with its animations and narrative techniques. As Trigger presents itself on Kickstarter or Patreon as an innovative studio, and a prime mover in the field of anime with creative freedom, their next work, BNA: Brand New Animal, is the first obliquely artificial, atrociously tedious - although otherwise garishly Trigger, with the typical Trigger wildness and dynamic Trigger scenes. Everything else, however, is the same old average stuff seen many times, which is absolutely nothing new, and just makes me indifferent to all the characters and events on screen like a cat to a newly bought cat bed. If you like the kitsch of Trigger’s style, then you too might want to create a story that shows the fight against racism, coming out and living within the LGBTQ community, or who-knows-what-else (to me, it does not seem like an accident that it was produced by Netflix). It will end up like this, an incredibly superficial and predictable affair, which is just another of the many reactionary animes of 2020. Attempting to watch twelve episodes, I was done after five. I give this a definite 1 star.

If someone introduced me to any anime represented by nine characters with extremely flamboyant hair on a poster, which according to the synopsis was going to be a teen comedy romance between a girl and a boy with tattoos and piercings, I would definitely kick that good-natured person to the curb, with a wry smile on my face. Fortunately, over the years, I have realized it is not good to judge an anime based on its synopsis, but rather on the names on the production team - and since the director of the unforgettable From the New World is responsible for Horimiya, I went for it. What I got was an excellent anime, which, despite all my preconceptions, is excellent from the beginning to the end. It is adult, confident, realistic, with great care taken over the drawing and animation, and a healthy dollop of both intelligent and simple situation comedy. Above all, however - is the well-crafted psychological side of the main and supporting characters, which combined with the impressive and playful audiovisual style means that practically every episode of Horimiya reminds you of where From the New World’s greatest strengths lay. It will certainly please people that the fact that Horimiya, like a good cross-country runner, successfully avoids all obstacles in the form of any silly tropes usual for this genre, and provides room and depth for the supporting characters - and, let us be honest here, this does not happen much with teen comedy romance anime. It has a few weaker moments (especially in the scenes without either Hori or Miyamura), but I have no doubt about the overall rating: a strict five stars, which includes my praise for the excellent opening and ending, which was the icing on the cake.

Despite the possible overestimation of Mirek's work and the curator’s handling of it, his authentic character is indisputable, and although this is an amateur documentary, it is very well made, and it manages to portray the genius of Kyjov's most famous citizen in an engaging way. "Sure, I am an observer, but I am as thorough as possible - an observer of everything! I never did anything else, other than pass the time. As I went out into the town, I had to do something, so I pressed the button on the camera. Then I put it under a magnifying glass, and what seemed like a new world to me, I printed it. The world is just an image of us, an illusion. Plus, a mistake, that is what makes poetry, like with a painter. Photography is something specific. It is a perception! Plus, it is happening so fast you can not even see it. The first thing you need is a bad camera! Then, if you want to be famous, you must do something so badly, that nobody else in the entire world will!”

I went through three phases while watching this. Phase one (episodes 1-3): looks interesting, however, Menma is really irritating. Phase Two (episodes 4-7): It is absolutely rubbish, the screenplay has more many holes in it than an old rag, and Menma was still really irritating, however, the other characters also rapidly started becoming very irritating, so I expected they would end up rating the same as Menma. Phase three (episodes 8-11): everyone is irritating, and I was just cynically enjoying their race for which of them would piss me off the most as a result. Plus, the right royally entertaining last episode ensured that they all crossed the finish line at once. Congratulations. +++++ Even if I hadn't known beforehand that the author was the queen of melodrama herself, Mari Okada herself, I would have easily realized that as I was watching it, because there are all her trademarks without exception: a bunch of main characters, whose character is reduced to a single distinctive trait, every character suffering from some trauma, being into some fetish, complex romantic entanglements between multiple characters, lacking simple boundaries, pathetically emotional ranting, and all over the place are fragile, broken and tormented souls. Sometimes either Mari or the script editors manage to water down such a deadly cocktail to make it easier to swallow (as in Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea, for example), but this was so clear that I kept going from cynically laughing to being close to throwing up - most intensely in the aforementioned last episode. There's probably no point in listing everything that does not make sense and is wrong, so I shall just mention what was good: certainly the opening, the animation and quite a bit of the ending. For these and for the fact that I watched it to the end, I give a stronger 1 star.

The year before, Japanese audiences lapped up the epic Demon Slayer, and this year they were won over by ghostbusters for a change. I can understand their popularity. This is a shonen, but compared to the canon, it is older, darker, gorier, and the heroes are more advanced. The monsters do not behave completely out of character, it can surprise, it can entertain, it can be pleasantly civil thanks to the (semi) realistic environment, and most importantly practically without the pathos and self-righteous moralizing that are usually characteristic of shonen animes. All this, together with interesting drawings and quality animation, looks really stylishly done. However, that is not enough for me. Although it is very nice to look at, after a while I started to feel more and more with each new episode that the story lacked consistency or any indication of plot development which was directionless. Although the 24 episodes are now behind me, I basically still do not know what the hell was going on, what it was really about, the muddled motivations of the villains, and why I should watch a sequel. Because of the fight scenes? Although there are a lot of them, they are well animated, and initially can surprise you with the result, in most cases their course is monotonous, they lack any real ideas, neither side tries to surprise their opponent with some clever tactics, and only nondescript bloody battles result from that, fizzles out or is resolved with a simple power-up. Which is a real shame. I give it a weak 3 stars with the fact that I will give the second season a chance, but I am not expecting too much. // Edit: So it appears that I was foolishly looking for something more sophisticated but actually the villains are simply aiming for world domination, just like about one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six villains from other shonen anime before them. Thanks a lot, guys…

This was a great idea, but terribly executed - that is how I would briefly describe Steins;Gate in a nutshell. If someone had told me that there was an anime packed with otaku culture, depression, paranoia, CERN, time travel, Norse mythology, romance, kawaii aesthetics, thriller, and some transgender themes, I would have probably thought that it would have turned out as some hard-to-take-seriously dreadful adolescent crap. But you would be surprised - it works unexpectedly really well and can be taken seriously. It all fits together nicely, and the time travel process is especially interesting, but when such a cocktail is dispensed at the pace of a dead snail, interspersed with countless scenes that are completely meaningless, and the screenwriting frequently wandering off to end up in dead ends, it results in something atrociously tedious that took me a while, almost a year before I could finally finish the 24 episodes. I often read that the first episodes are boring, and then it gets much better and grabs you. However, I only noticed an increased interest in myself only around the 12th episode, which is damn late for a 24-episode anime, after which they were successful in making me bored out of my mind yet again, and it was only during the last few episodes that the overall impression improved a bit. I am convinced that cutting the length of this season in half and removing some practically useless characters (I mean Feris and Luka especially) would help and my rating could be completely different. My rating is exactly on the border between 2 and 3, but if I compare it to a similar anime I rate as a 3 (for example, the much livelier Erased or The Tatami Galaxy), then I am not able to give it more than 2 stars.

This was an unpleasant surprise. The Given anime series appealed to me, due to the ease and credibility of the way the band's story was portrayed, the development of relationships and the evolution of the four main characters in an almost perfect balance, all of which the producers managed to spice up with a healthy dollop of good music. In the movie follow-up, however, two of the characters are completely sidelined, the band's story and music basically take a holiday, and the mainstay of the story becomes the relationship between the other two characters, where irritating BL tropes begin to creep in, and where in the space of just an hour the pace starts to falter, spoiling the original lightness and natural vibe. Of course, the movie also managed to preserve its civil nature, the high-quality character portrayals, and, in the end, gives us a bit of good music as a band-aid, but what appealed to me about the series is irredeemably blown away. The ending with its kind of inevitable fated relationship outcome also did not help me gain a good impression, and it was then I began to regret that I did not just stick with the series. Yaoists can boldly put their feet up on the table and enjoy this audiovisual fodder, but I would have to reconsider watching the eventual sequel. I give it a weak 3 stars.

This is the anime I had always dreamed of. Not because it takes place in Kawagoe, where I had a nice trip at once, and which brings back a lot of memories, but because it is an unassuming gem that gambled everything on a single card and succeeded. That card is believability. They bet everything on it: they threw away the popular tropes associated with high school romance anime, they threw away the typical character designs, and they threw away any exaggeration to which the setting of a Japanese school can create. To make matters worse, the production company decided to focus on the psychological side of the characters, and created a very serious coming-of-age contemporary romance that does not take place in high school, as is the case with other anime, but rather at the end of junior high school. They could not have risked any more - but a miracle happened, it all worked out. Together with a fitting soundtrack, and engaging artwork, a completely believable story unfolds over only 12 episodes, and with each passing episode, it never ceases to amaze you with its playfulness, freshness, degree of believability, attention to detail, the director's assuredness - and yet the finesse with which it is narrated. I understand that for a Western audience, believability can be uncomfortably startling: there are no eccentric heroes with strangely-colored eyes or hair, and instead of going off on some exciting adventure, the characters awkwardly engage in embarrassing school activities, and boring studying for entrance exams, they do not scream, they do not giggle, they do not behave like idiots, and the parents and teachers behave the way Japanese parents and teachers often do - in both good and bad ways. Many people may find the development of the heroes' relationship a little too rosy - but in my opinion it is more the result of watching other anime, where in accordance with the unwritten Japanese tradition they have to make the story as dramatic as possible, and throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of the heroes to show how much they have suffered for their successes, and that they have to deserve that happiness. These obstacles are also there, but there is a reasonable amount of them - and that brings us back to the beginning of my review. Again, I verified the hypothesis that Kishi knows how to direct anime, as long as it is not an adaptation of a video game. Until the penultimate episode, it looked like a strong 4 stars, but the end completely amazed me, and so I decided to definitely award it the full thumbs up. Watching this again in the future is guaranteed - and I'm already looking forward to seeing what other interesting details I can find. –– Edit: This anime reverberates in my memory so much that it simply has to make it to the top. Wonderful.

Ridicule me if you wish: I openly admit that, despite its general popularity, I am not so in love with soft-focus soothing anime. Whether it is Natsume's Book of Friends, Barakamon or Tamako Market, for example, these and similarly meaningless anime usually fail to satisfy me, because the production company are not able to balance the lack of a strong and coherent plot and suspense with interesting characters, a well-built atmosphere or, for example, good comedy. Therefore, I am all the happier that this time I bet on the right horse and Non Non Biyori managed to offer all of the above. This is sleepy, slow storytelling of events surrounding a newcomer from Tokyo, and several small redneck-girls from a town in the sticks where tanuki raccoon dogs wish you good night. Things that are impossible in Tokyo become a raw reality in the small town. This show offers you good characters, a variety of funny, pleasant or just soothing scenes, and interestingly its tranquil atmosphere works well, like when you realise a single long shot accompanied by well-chosen music, took a minute. It is good to watch especially at the end of the day, and it knows how to make you happy when binge-watching or taking it slow with occasional viewing in small doses. I give it a mere 4 stars.