Mainichi Anime Yume
Yesterday I attended one of the limited US screenings of the two Madoka movies. The two movies were screened subtitled as a double-feature in a downtown LA theater, with a fifteen minute intermission in between. Also, exclusive to the LA screenings was Aniplex selling some Madoka goodies at the theater (helped by Anime Jungle, a local anime store). As expected, it was an awesome event to say the least…
Another season of anime has come once again and again I’ve selected a few of those to watch throughout the coming months. And as always, I wanted to share my first impressions of those series after watching the first 2-3 episodes of each…
kevo’ over on Desu ex Machina recently wrote a post about an upcoming anime he can’t help but highly anticipate, while simultaneously realizing that it doesn’t always pay for us to set our expectations for an unknown anime too high. As someone who rarely hypes up an anime I haven’t yet seen, it got me thinking about how our expectations can make or break our opinion about an anime…
As much as we love anime, there’s no denying that the medium is, for better or worse, full of cliches. But as I’ve mentioned in past posts, this isn’t always a bad thing; I’m of the opinion that a cliche doesn’t necessarily equal poor writing if it carries out an appealing cliche well or adds something memorable to it. Not only does anime have its own set of unique cliches not found in other mediums, but because it caters to a lot of different genres, it naturally has cliches to match all kinds of tastes. We all have our anime cliches we like and don’t like, so today I’d like to look at my favorite and least favorite ones…
In a recent post on deluscar, Kai brings up the fact that video games have become a lot more “realistic” than they used to be, especially in visual terms thanks to advanced technology. But he also argues that even though they’ve taken on this new level of depth, they still can’t display the same level of realism as anime and perhaps other animation can…
Ace Railgun recently brought up the topic of how casts of characters in anime are handled, whether the series has a large and gradually expanding cast or a small, consistent one. It’s interesting to think about how the number of characters in an anime can affect the overall quality, especially in regards to how many episodes the series has…
Another summer anime season is coming to an end while another fall season is around the corner, and as usual at this time of year I want to discuss my thoughts on the shows I’ve completed…
A recent post by Leap250 talks about how, through our years of being anime fans, we often acquire tastes for certain genres and tropes in anime that we didn’t originally have. Even though I’ve always been pretty open-minded as far as the types of anime I watch, there were a few I was hesitant about back in the day that I like now…
A couple of blogs have recently posted lists of anime characters who are well loved among the fandom, but they personally don’t care for. It got me thinking about what each of our individual idea is of a likable character versus an unlikable one, and just like our preference for favorite anime in general, one person’s “worst” is another person’s “best.” However, because anime characters don’t have as many facets as anime series in general, I think our opinions about them tend to be more polarized – we either love (mostly) everything about them or we dislike (mostly) everything about them. So today I felt like examining how we judge anime characters…
One thing that I’ve often thought about is how our generation is the first to experience full immersion in the technological media world from childhood to adulthood. If you were born in the 80s or later, you’re among the first generation of kids to grow up in the media-centered world of cable TV, video games, video rentals, and most importantly, the Internet. Anime is one among many fandoms that have been able to flourish because of this sudden proliferation of technology we’ve seen come about in just a couple of decades…