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Mar 30, 2021
Inside the front cover of each manga volume is an alternate universe scene of what's on the front cover (many manga do this, like Trigun). I choose to think this horrendous, stinky garbage fire of a season is simply an alternate universe and maybe we'll get another season of it that does the story justice. Or maybe it's all just a dream (doesn't Emma have a hallucination on her way to Goldy Pond?) After all, that worked so well for the When We Cry series...
This is basically a 10 episode season because 1 episode is a summary (because the season moves at light speed
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you require a summary episode to make sure you've gotten all of the exposition dumps).
STORY: Did you know that the working title for this season of The Promised Neverland was "Dumpster Fire?" True facts! When I finished season 1 and heard there was another season coming out, I just had to read the manga. So I requested all of the manga from the library but by the time they came in, season 2 had started. I watched immediately, and was thrown off by the time the kids got to the shelter. Something felt off about that scene with the cookies. And then the wall, and how quickly things happened. Who were those other humans? How were they found? Just wtf in general? So I binged the manga. Without getting into the manga plot, all I can say is they dumped a LOT out of the anime and the anime moves at light speed to the point that it doesn't make sense, even to those who haven't read the manga. To those of us who have... the ending is not just insulting but it physically painful to watch.
CHARACTER: Despite the plot train heading straight to crap town, the main characters are utterly lovable. I just wish the LITERALLY 70 characters they removed between the manga to anime conversion were there. They dropped some really great ones. Still, Emma, Ray, and Norman remain as lovable as ever. I wish they had taken more time on Mujika and Sonju, though. I mean the pair got their own scene in the ED, leading us to believe they'd matter more.
ART: Beautiful, of course. Which makes it all the more insulting.
MUSIC/SOUND: Sorry, was too busy being angry to notice whether or not it mattered. I guess it was all right? They even put in, for instance, owls hooting. If you read the manga, you know what that means. So what was the point here?? I don't get it.
ENJOYMENT: I couldn't sleep when I was done. Literally angry and insulted. I didn't think an anime could ever make me feel so furious.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 8, 2021
I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was to see this! First off, With COVID, movie theaters closed for months. When they reopened, they offered this as a Fathom event. I booked my family asap.
SOUND: Top notch, Red Jacket dub sound. My husband, who is a sub elitist, loved it.
ANIMATION: Are you kidding me? I was so impressed with this. I played the Lupin III PS2 game, which was an acceptable port to 3D models and is still passable. This was like reliving that x100000. My husband thought that it was a real movie with 2D/3D on top of it when he saw
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the previews (Roger Rabbit style, I guess?).
STORY: Typical damsel in distress of the week. Lupin movies/OVAs seem to be either amaze balls or terrible, with nothing in between. Lately, they’ve been stealthing new storylines to become the new normal. So beyond Lupin, Jigen, Goemon, Zenigata, and Fujiko we have Zenigata’s assistant and Rebecca. But neither were in this installation. It seems to be a simple spin off, sort of a one off story. And that was absolutely fine.
CHARACTER: Typical fare. I suppose it could be difficult for a newer fan to understand some of the relationships, but for Lupin fans it was just fine.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 3, 2020
Oh, I loved this movie! I rewrote the synopsis, so I hope it goes through. There were some inaccuracies. Koyomi Araragi is a new vampire, a minion of Kiss-shot Acerola-orion Heart-under-blade. Even though he is a freshly made vampire, he quickly learns that he is a powerful monster on par with the hunters after Heart-under-blade. Araragi duels three hunters: Dramaturgy, a hulking vampire, Episode, a half-vampire who can transform into mist, and Guillotinecutter, a human priest even more dangerous than the others. With the assistance of Hear-under-blade and Oshino Meme, Araragi learns of his new abilities and must embrace the powerful monster within in order
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to save his dear friend, Hanekawa. But all along, all Araragi has wanted was to be human again. Is that human part still within him?
REVIEW: I loved Bakemonogatari when it was originally out. However, I don't think it's held up well. But once you see THIS series of movies, the anime series will seem so inferior. The characters seamlessly move between rotoscope and regular animation. The 3D backgrounds are integrated well. The animation is just so smooth and beautiful! The characters are more believable and endearing.
I always wanted to know more about Shinobu and here we go! I enjoy watching her transformation in these movies. And my favorite was Black Hanekawa in the original anime. In this movie, we get to see Hanekawa build her relationship with Araragi in a beilevable way. Bakemonogatari is known for it's random ecchi choices. In this movie, the choices they made were rare and (I'm saying this as a female who isn't really a fan of fan service) believably enjoyable. I LOVED Hanekawa's relationship with Araragi; flirty, friendly, and actual relationship depth. So much so that I REALLY want her to end up with him and hate that he's with Senjougahara in Bakemonogatari. Buuuut the characters are so different between the two mediums that they can really be considered different people. There's a delicious scene in this movie where Hanekawa brings Araragi a change of clothes and just stares at him while he's changing, and our usually confidently lecherous Araragi is uncomfortable with it. It's great having the tables turned haha.
Beyond their relationship, the fights were beautiful. There's a scene with a lot of blood and somehow it's both gory and beautiful, like a dance. Also, it was great as Araragi learned about his abilities. Terror and confidence and his opinion of his monstrous changes. The end fight scene is just gorgeous. I wish all the monogatari series looked like this!
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Nov 8, 2019
STORY: Finally! Things are starting to come together! The last few years have seen a series of Lupin movies in the same art style. This was the last one in the "series" as we move on to the finale. I really hope that the next one is Zenigata focused. A fun thing about this story was flipping the typical Lupin story about a young girl, damsel in distress story on it's head with Fujiko working to help a young boy. The story has no morale, nor overly dramatic Hero's Journey type ending. Fujiko isn't Lupin, after all. Fujiko is Fujiko, and will always be Fujiko.
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She's the one in the group that will never evolve as a character, and there's nothing wrong with that. She's successful, and stopped being the damsel a LONG time ago. So why change? It's who she is, and this story is true to that.
ART: Absolutely gorgeous animation. A lot of effort put into the animation for sure. Something that was pretty neat was that this was a... no jacket Lupin story. Which makes sense, because it was Fujiko's story, not Lupin's.
ENJOYMENT: Another gem in the Lupin franchise. There's some enjoyment here in a one time watch; not sure it's good enough for a rewatch, but I enjoyed it!
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Oct 15, 2019
This anime is an absolute masterpiece.
Let's talk about the MUSIC. Watanabe's shows are all themed to some specific music type. This one is pop, and pop of the 20th century. The music is so far all over the place, it's great! There's even tributes to recent memes. Loved it!
There is an episode that I frowned at, because it was marked as M for Mature and I had no idea why. My Carole and Tuesday are not M. And then the Mermaid Sisters started singing. I've seen people hating on their song, but it's so clearly a tribute to the Sockapellas. Loved it! And
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definitely gave that episode the M rating!
Besides that, many music anime only end up with one or two hit songs (looking at you, K-on!). This one had at least one song PER EPISODE. On top of that, once the girls got into competition with other singers, we had multiple GOOD songs per episode. Fantastic!
Let's talk about the ART. If you've read any of my reviews, you know I cannot stand 3D art poorly placed in 2D. The 3D in this shows is almost seamless. They also use quite a bit of rotoscoping that really adds to the show. You can tell the animators spent a lot of effort on this gorgeous show. And the character design is off the charts. Yes, all the main characters look the same (tiny adorable facial features, skinny), but all the minor characters have a variety of skin tones, hair styles, and body types. This anime showed up every fitness anime I've ever seen in terms of body types on display.
Let's talk about the STORY. The anime was a little heavy handed with the, "We're in the future, that means all sexualities and gender identities are accepted as the norm now." Besides that, it was a fun, light hearted story that could have gotten much darker. Cowboy Bebop this is not. But it just makes your heart feel lighter for watching, and that's fantastic!
EDIT: Now that I finished the series, I wanted to add to my review. The first half of the series is still a masterpiece. The second half tries desperately to cram way too much in. Racism, paternity, forced love interests for both the main characters, family tension, death, drugs, disappointment, censorship, immigration, the idea of celebrity... it digs into all of these things without ever really dealing with any of them fully! Had they dealt with half of these things, or extended the series to really give each item the attention they deserved, the show would have remained a masterpiece in my eyes. I was disappointed by the end =/
And there are 2 end cards after the finale. I was very excited for the first one and the second one had me laughing out loud.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Sep 22, 2019
Bro, do you even lift?! I have a dear friend who told me once that she didn’t like anime because the majority of it perpetrated a certain type of body stereotype. I never forced my love of anime on her, because she felt personally bullied by shows telling her to be waif thin. As much as I enjoyed this show, it’s still a typical body stereotype underneath the infotainment. I feel that it could have been so much better if the studio could afford better animation/art (ie. Pay the animators better, give them more time to work, etc.) if we see real physical changes and
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development in show about those things. Heck, I would’ve been happy if they gave the characters better workout clothes instead of another plain block color shirt and shorts combo.
Hibiki, for example, starts off “fat.” What that means is that she is a teensy bit curvy. In episode 2 she weighed herself and griped that she gained weight omg. She weighed the equivalent of 123 lbs. Now, I understand that a typical Japanese woman is much smaller than a typical American woman. I know that from personal experience, looking at their XL sizes and largest possible shoe sizes to fit me. Oh, me? I’m 130 lbs, 5’8”, and fitter than I was as a cheerleader in high school eons ago (yup, I’m an Anime Obachan). So for Hibiki to be griping about her weight at 123 lbs seemed awful to me; like telling women this weight was unacceptable. At another point in the same episode, Hibiki is standing next to the character she decides is the “dream girl” figure. They looked EXACTLY ALIKE in body type. This is not healthy. I feel like had they spent more time on the physical designs of the characters this obsession with body types would have meant more.
Rant over! There were so many great things about this anime too. The teacher with the cosplay hobby she doesn’t want her students to know about, the macho personal trainer with the adorable face, and all the information. A good show, overall, if you want something without much substance!
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Sep 22, 2019
I didn’t see the original anime in the early 2000s, but the preview for this one really pulled me in. I guess the original anime seemed too simple, from the expressions to the basic animation to the very solid color scheme and the bad voice acting dub. I just wasn’t interested. But this new anime PV was just beautiful. I checked it out on day one of simulcast and loved it. The art was soft, more refined, and less stylized. But then... I couldn’t get enough! So I flipped over to a different streaming service and tried to watch the first anime. Bleh! I gave
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up and went for the manga. It explained a lot in terms of the first anime adaptation style choices. They were so similar! But as for this anime? You ever read a manga and the adaptation is superior in every possible way, from the sounds you imagined to the animation in general? (Ex. The Land of the Lustrous.) That’s this anime.
I picked up the manga because I hoped there was more to it than they story I had built up in my head based on typical anime tropes. Thankfully, Fruits Basket doesn’t fit into most. This isn’t a typical love triangle or harem. After reading the entire series, I can confidently say that it’s a drama (akin to a soap opera with the intense level of surprises we have) about personal growth, although the main character is certainly the catalyst for a lot of that personal growth. Every single character goes through some major change through the series. All of the “kids” in the series literally, physically grow, but they all grow as people too.
The anime slaps you with Tohru Honda’s extreme kindness and politeness and hurriedly tells you about each member of the zodiac in the Sohma family so that it can start getting to the meat of the series, because that’s not even close to being the family’s problem. Before watching, I thought it would be a cutesy “oh no I transformed at an inopportune time!” Anime. The “curse of the zodiac” is more about how they treat one another and view themselves than the forced change and bond that they share. If you cannot embrace a member of the opposite sex and your secrets are shared in your family alone, you form a tight knit group of weirdos with priorities in all the wrong places. The curse is, surprisingly, not as big an issue as you’d think. The series goes entire volumes with no one changing into their zodiac animal.
Tohru is definitely one of the catalysts for change, but the characters go through so many changes on their own. (Halfway through the manga, the perspective gradually moves to that of the Sohma family, leaving Tohru mostly to her own development.) They just needed someone with an outside perspective who genuinely cared. How would you change if you suddenly had someone enter your world who viewed things differently than you’d always been taught?? I really can’t wait for season 2!
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jul 27, 2019
This movie had a LOT of problems...
SETTING: I don’t really understand the setting. Traditionally, Lupin has traveled all over the world instead of sticking to one location. Real places and real people have always been used and expanded on; for instance, da Vinci was made into a psychic super villain once. However, in this movie we have scenes in places like Area 61 and Las Vegas Arizona. In other words, very slightly off. We also had a Snowden knockoff for some reason (he’s in the movie for all of 30 seconds). And on top of that, the evil Big Bad is named Emilika. She’s supposed
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to be Chopin’s sister, Emilia, but it sounds so similar to how America is pronounced in Japanese, that it’s hard NOT to think that this isn’t some poorly veiled jab at America. Everyone seems over the top mean, cruel, and stupid. You have characters thinking attack drones are delivering pizza, texting while driving, and just being completely oblivious. The president is a self-centered, greedy woman whose solution to a problem is to bomb it. At one point Lupin openly complains about America using brute force. And it’s all set in America. Frankly, the movie seemed passively aggressively hostile towards America.
SOUND: Typical great voice acting and jazz music! However, the addition of Chopin as a main piece seemed random.
ART: I love Lupin art because it’s so atypical anime style. There’s a lot of heavy Western influence, especially in some of the 70s and 80s Lupin anime. This is not one of them. This one fully embraces its Japanese origins while still placing the anime mostly in America, which just came across as culturally odd and somewhat discordant. The 3D animation, specifically EVERY SINGLE TIME someone played a piano, was absolutely terrible and jarringly different from the rest of the art style. Some animations were cute, some shots were typical Lupin flavor, while others felt overly done and unnecessary just for the sake of the shot, as if the director and art coordinators got in an argument about the reasoning behind a scene and ended with, “Just do it for the Gram!”
STORY: All Lupin III franchise specials and movies have a pretty specific formula. And that formula has worked since the 1960s, most of the time. This is one of those rare times it didn’t work. It’s like the production team just didn’t understand Lupin. They sat down and thought, “Ok, we need a teenage girl in danger. We need Fujiko to betray Lupin and side with a bad guy, but turns out she’s probably on his side and being selfish, or IS SHE?!?! We need a possible break up between Lupin and his partners. Don’t forget Zenigata! Give him some ridiculous mini subplot. And make sure the Big Bad wants to do something EXTRA EVIL that might actually be magic, but is also something Lupin would steal, ok?”
I was disappointed in this one for a lot of reasons. (1) The Lupin franchise has been traditionally hard to detail the timeline, canon, and even character backgrounds. But this one will just make your head hurt in the first 5 minutes. We have Area 61, Las Vegas Arizona, etc. But very specific on piano details. Things that are wrong just for the sake of confusion. I’m still unclear on Jigen’s subplot and Zenigata’s minor entanglement. (2) There was too much going on. I’m still not sure what happened. Just overall too much happened. (3) There are many different Lupin anime, OVAs, specials, movies, live action, absolutely everything. Heck I just found a Lupin board game at a flea market, and I have the PS2 game. That said, the franchise has struggled with what it wants to be. In one, you have a goofy Zenigata who walks around yelling “crap crap crap!” While in another he’s the epitome of overly dedicated, straight laced cop, and in yet another he’s hooking up with Fujiko and acting a bit shady. Some of those can pass for PG-13 easily while others are a hard R. The original manga series had a very dark Lupin, definitely not innocent and pc. This movie though?? It seemed like it was trying to pass itself as PG. No smoking from the Good Guys. No blood. No deaths. When someone did die, you saw it in silhouette. Surprise! Everyone that’s a Good Guy is Completely Pure and Innocent. And honestly that’s not what Lupin is, so ruins a bit of the enjoyment.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jul 24, 2019
I'd be interested in reading the source material that this hot garbage came from. This show was the poor man's Natsume Yuujinchou, completely lacking in all emotion and quality all around.
*Sound: terrible. Every time the "Anothers" speak, it's in this weird double voice that makes them exceedingly difficult to listen to. Plus they speak so closely to human nuances that the whole point of the anime is thrown off.
*Art: Although the art style is a bit different from typical stuff, the way flying characters just hover with no movement to hair and no realistic movement bothers me. It also bothers me that when
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a character is looking "thoughtful," they just stare. There is no soul in ANY of the characters' eyes.
*Story: I like the idea. Dude has an ability that allows him to communicate with spirits, but they're not friendly ghosts (except that most love him anyway). He helps people by communicating where they can't, and has a tie to them thanks to an ancestor whom everyone mistakes him for. Sound familiar? It's already been done, and done SO much better!
*Character: So the Ears of Sand main character can hear "Anothers." You have a former host, an androgynous scientist, a tech guy? with no personality, and a whole slew of one dimensional single shot characters. I suppose if the anime stretched multiple seasons they might get development like in Natsume, but as it stands they're awful. Then there's the fact that the "Anothers" are supposed to be so far removed from human understanding that we just can't get along, but by the end of the first few episodes the main character has an Another cat living with him and acting like a cat as well as a supposedly terrifying trickster god from Aztec culture.
*Enjoyment: None. I kept waiting for it to pick a theme that wasn't so heavy handed, but it's really all there is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Apr 2, 2019
I love this show for a few reasons. Kaguya's thought process is exactly what mine was in high school when it came to boys. And I can imagine the president's thought process being realistic as well. And that would be enough to make a humorous enough show, but then they threw Chika in. Chika is best girl! I don't know how they managed such a perfect mix for her. Just the right cuteness, cleverness, silly personality all mixed with some quirks and the perfect voice actor.
STORY: The story is great. The theory overall is advertised as "in the most prestigious school, it's all about
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who has the most power in a relationship!" But it's more like "two tsunderes refuse to confess their love for one another and hilarity ensues." More than that, the president often has meticulous plans laid out, while Kaguya uses her family's money and influence to lay her own plans, and these plans are foiled in small, subtle ways by Chika, who is completely innocent (except when she's throwing dirty jokes at Kaguya to make her laugh, of course).
ART: Typical anime fare, nothing to write home about. I was hoping they'd do more with the war theme. Especially considering the beauty of the eyes that they're going for, I was hoping for something more like you see in Kakeguri. But it's fine, no complaints.
SOUND: Well, the music is great. I never got sick of listening to the OP, and then there's Chika's song that is just a masterpiece. The nuances of the main trio's voice acting is really perfect. You can find little snippets on YouTube of, for instance, Chika being adorable one second and flipping out the next, rapping, and making adorable sounds of frustration with the president's lack of athletic skills.
CHARACTER: I will definitely be reading the manga after watching the anime, because I felt that there wasn't nearly enough character development for Kaguya's maid and the student council treasurer. I wasn't sure what we were meant to feel for him; he makes inappropriate and sexist comments, but Kaguya calls him friend. I don't, at any point, like this guy. Then there's some random stalker following a certain couple around, that is never explained. But the other characters are all likeable, especially our main trio.
OVERALL: Reminded me of Wotakoi or Nozaki-kun. Really great, especially when plans go awry or when Kaguya thinks way too hard about something and immediately flips her opinion when things change again. There was only one episode I disliked because one character went from being adorable to being fanservice, and she didn't need that - everyone already loved her!
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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