Anime for people who don’t like anime

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…

[Read more…]

Finding the appeal (and plot) of plot-less anime

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…

[Read more…]

The AniBloggers Choice Awards: my top 12 anime of 2011

Since 2008, I’ve been selecting my top 5 anime of that year and posting about them on the blog around New Year’s. This year however, I’m trying something new with Kiddtic’s AniBloggers Choice Anime Awards project. Instead of picking only five 2011 series, I’m picking twelve, as well as an overall series of the year and licensor of the year…

[Read more…]

Double Noitamina review: No.6 and Usagi Drop

Like last season’s [C] and AnoHana, this passing summer season of anime included a sci-fi and slice-of-life Noitamina series; No.6 and Usagi Drop respectively. With the typical Noitamina run of just 11 episodes, how did the two vastly different shows fare?…

[Read more…]

My top 5 anime of the season

For lack of a better post today, I decided to try something new and pick my current five favorites amongst the seasonal anime I’m watching (with inspiration from kevo’s ongoing “Anime Power Rankings” project)…

[Read more…]

Anime and its misleading tones

Yet another unique anime attribute is how many series can convey a variety of different tones regardless of their genre or target audience. What I mean by this is that it’s not uncommon for action/violent anime to have scenes of beauty, anime laden with gore to have moments of cuteness, or cute, sugary anime to feature things that are dark and disturbing…

[Read more…]

First impressions of the summer ’11 anime I’m watching

Credit to linked pixiv user

Unlike the spring ’11 season where it took me a while to decide what to watch, this summer I feel like I’ve decided on too many to watch XD Here are my opinions on what I’ve seen as of now…

[Read more…]