Mainichi Anime Yume
It’s once again time for me to look back on all the anime I watched this year and decide which 5 were my favorites. Some years it’s easy for me to pick, other years it’s not so easy. I actually didn’t watch quite as much anime in 2014 as I did in previous years due to being busy with work, school, and other hobbies, so it wasn’t too difficult to narrow down my favorites this time…
It’s that time again – anime from the previous season have ended and it’s time for me to pick new seasonal shows to watch! Here are my first impressions of the fall 2014 anime I picked after watching the first couple of episodes…
Now that I’ve seen two episodes of all the spring ’14 anime on my watch list (except for Mekaku City Actors, which has only one episode out so far) I figured it’s time to once again write my initial impressions of them…
A recent post on Japan Powered talks about certain anime titles that even people who hate anime could watch and enjoy. The idea it’s bringing out is that, despite how much we love it, we know that all anime – from shonen to slice-of-life – is full of tropes and character archetypes we see over and over again. Many of these cliches we love, some we don’t, but generally what makes us stay fans is that we don’t mind such things in our anime or even have specific tropes we can’t get enough of. But for some people, anime-specific tropes such as bishy guys, moe girls, giant robots, wild fantasy battles, and cuteness for cuteness’ sake, just aren’t their thing. So today I wanted to think about what anime are virtually free of these cliches and seem to cater to universal tastes rather than otaku tastes…
An interesting thought occurred to me recently in terms of how anime series are structured. It seems that most anime series focus on “building” one out of three narrative aspects – either building the story, building the characters, or building the world. Some focus on two out of three, a few manage to focus equally on all three – but it’s intriguing to think about which of the three each series is most concerned with…
The argument that’s often made against anime classified as slice-of-life and iyashi-kei is that “nothing happens.” In other words, the shows are plot-less, which to some makes them boring and stupid. As someone who enjoys these kinds of anime as much as anime in any other genre, I’m going to examine why this is so…
A couple of weeks ago, Caraniel came up with a great idea for a post that entails thinking about which of the various anime worlds you would like to visit. I thought it would be a fun thing to try, so like Caraniel, I came up with a list of five worlds in anime I would enjoy spending time in…
The idea that, in order for people to like an anime, it has to have a good story AND good characters, sounds plausible. However, that’s not the case for many fans – often times, they’ll like one of the two aspects in a series and not so much the other. For me, there are many anime I like for both the story and the characters, but there are also just as many I like for only one of the two…
Mushishi has been on my computer in my “anime-to-watch” folder for a while before I finally sat down and marathoned the first 4 episodes last night. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the series, and after watching these few episodes, I think it definitely deserves the praise it gets…