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Aug 14, 2021
Another is one of those shows that, by all counts, I can't really call good, but I still had a ball watching it. I think a lot of horror fans in particular will absolutely vibe with that. It doesn't always make sense, it's downright cheesy sometimes, but it's spooky and fun, and any b movie gore connoisseur will have built up an immunity to Bad But Good by now. Just watch the opening and your little horror schlock heart will pitter patter. If you're willing to suspend your disbelief and take the show for what it is, you'll have a great time.
The writing is a
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weird combination of extremely cool concepts mixed in randomly with very dumb and contrived concepts. It is like picking through a bag of randomly flavored jelly beans, most of which are good, some of which are awesome, but every so often you'll land on a black licorice with no warning. The editing and sound design in particular do an excellent job of building suspense and mystery, but you figure out the patterns pretty quick. This is a magician who accidentally reveals his secrets fairly regularly.
Generally speaking, it strikes me as a good show that could have been a great show but kept shooting itself in the foot. The characters are likable and interesting, some even have a hint of a pretty deep character arc, but their development never quite reaches its potential. Likewise, the relationships between the characters are treated as important but without much development to actually convince us. It could have been a truly stellar anime with those missing potentials lived up to! Likewise, the plot keeps doing cool things, introducing psychologically interesting tensions, but then in the same breath comes up with some random convenient contrivance out of nowhere that tempers the quality. The animation itself also feels slightly limited, especially the character animation, so that scenes meant to be horrifyingly graphic sometimes fall flat just in terms of budget.
As a result, we wind up with an overall pretty average-level anime instead of anything groundbreaking. But as a horror fan myself, that was enough to have a lot of fun anyway and be watching eagerly for the next episode. It keeps up tension well from start to finish, the mystery does have some great ideas involved, and the over-the-topness is more fun than groan-worthy. It's borderline campy at times, but what self-respecting horror fan doesn't love that?
This is probably one of the best horror anime out there in a not-particularly-outstanding pile of examples, so I would recommend it to anybody wanting to explore more horror in the medium.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Aug 7, 2021
The Cool Aloof Guy With Long Hair And Icy Eyes is a standard of shoujo romances, and new college student Satomi finds herself immediately susceptible to a classmate with exactly this description. However, this gay little manga decides to ask the burning question: what if the dreamy cool guy was a GIRL?
As pretty much every trope can be improved with lesbianism, I was sold pretty quickly. The cool guy being a girl immediately makes a character archetype I didn't particularly care for 1) funny and 2) unexpectedly super endearing in her moments of awkwardness given the misunderstanding central to her circumstances.
The two women start accidentally
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dating without Satomi knowing that she's dating a girl, and this leads to a lot of awkward hijinks. It's nonsensical of course, but what sells it is that the characters are genuinely likable and really cute. Don't expect anything revolutionary or genre-busting here. This is definitely a feel-good romp through tropes you know and want. But that's why it's good. It gives you what you want in the cute romance department with a twist of situational comedy and heaps of misunderstandings that are more charming than annoying. There aren't any particular surprises, but there also aren't any GROSS surprises so I count that as a win for an enjoyable, comfy read. It's just good romance, folks!
The art is also quite nice. I particularly was endeared by the couple's character designs and how they reflected their personalities.
All in all, not particularly groundbreaking, but I didn't come here for groundbreaking. The grounding of my favorite comfy romance tropes is enough for me to work with, thanks.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jul 20, 2019
If I had to convince a jury of stick-in-the-mud college professors that manga could be “literature”, I would hand over this volume of oneshots just to torment them. It's actually fairly high-brow, for whatever that means.
Kokoro no Kanashimi is a stand-out in terms of style, and for that reason it's one that would probably engage an artsier crowd of manga newbies, as it doesn't require any background understanding of manga aesthetics. You won't have to explain to anybody why big sparkly eyes and sweatdrops are standard visual cues for this one. However, for the same reason, it might alienate established manga fans exactly because it
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doesn't adhere at all to expectations. I don't mean this in terms of taste, so much as it just feels like reading a different language. Personally, that's what I found so refreshing about it.
The Nishioka siblings are an avant-garde mangaka team, and their works tend to be surrealistic visually and brooding and existential in terms of subject matter. You can get a great taste of that in the shorts in Kokoro no Kanashimi.
The style is downright psychedelic and beautifully thought-out, everything right down to the paneling choices carrying the weight of meaning. The art and storytelling both have the fluid, vaguely off-kilter feel of dreams, symbolism often standing in the place of an actual setting or plot to evoke an emotion rather than a message, and with just a hint of a sinister after-taste. There's even some dry humor in the presentation, which reminds me a bit of the cheeky opening to Kafka's Metamorphosis. "When Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant cockroach." That matter-of-factness about the bizarre is exactly the tone of this manga.
Each story is based very much in the boring everyday but with certain details decidedly sideways, like a protagonist whose girlfriend inexplicably holds a snake in her mouth throughout their relationship, or a fisherman who just can’t seem to find a place to cast his line one day no matter where he goes. They’re very simple stories that express very complex emotions, and I loved the ache this collection left me with. The general tone is melancholy, but never overbearingly so. There’s a sort of quiet hope and purpose to the melancholy.
My favorite story was the third chapter, called Sadness of the Heart, where a man attempts to leave his sadness with a priest. I’ll give the synopsis here as a taste of how these stories go, but by all means don’t read on if you’d rather go in blind: The protagonist physically pulls his sadness out of his chest and hands it over, and it looks like a lumpy fetus thing. The priest keeps it. Years later, the protagonist has been living without sadness but has learned that the absence of sadness doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of happiness. While ruminating on this, he again visits the priest and asks how his sadness is doing. The priest takes him out to the garden where the little creature is swimming in the koi pond among the fish. “It’s playing?” the protagonist asks. “Yes,” says the priest. They both simply watch it as it swims around. We're left wondering if the protagonist made the right choice.
It’s weird, it sticks in your brain, and I loved every bit of it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jul 4, 2019
I ran headfirst into this anime based purely on my love for kappas, and boy I was in for some surprises. The premise: three high school boys get turned into kappas to fight monsters and save the world. What I got: a lot of ass jokes.
(For those who don’t know, kappas can essentially suck your soul out of your ass according to myth. This show really likes that idea.)
The tone immediately establishes itself as “what the hell did I just watch?” levels of absurd, but that’s actually what makes the show work, I think. It delivers on its weirdass humor (pun very much intended), but
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the same tone also paves the way for a surrealist plot that never fully makes sense but absolutely digs into abstract themes about emotion and the nature of our relationships to one another. In the first episode, we’re introduced to our heroes each carrying around an old Amazon box everywhere they go containing one of their deepest secrets. It’s a weird and vaguely tongue-in-cheek allegory, but it packs a punch the moment those boxes are opened. It doesn’t make sense right up until it does. This “gotcha” approach to storytelling made me genuinely feel things throughout the show, and also managed to be quite fun and unpretentious in the process.
I guess for me the question becomes: is Sarazanmai really that deep?
Honestly, probably not. It suffers a bit from not quite committing to the themes it introduces, and so once you’ve parsed through the stylistic elements, the messages are fairly standard anime fare. You might even notice that some of the plot contrivances border on melodrama and convenience when you aren't so bamboozled by the style. (And it’s still a good 50% ass jokes–unrepentantly so.) HOWEVER, this doesn’t at all diminish the emotional payoff in my opinion. It's a rollercoaster of tragedy vs life-affirming hype, and if you just suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride, you’re in for a hell of a treat.
In other words, I’m not sure if Sarazanmai holds up to a more critical eye in retrospect, but did I have a great time watching it? Hell yeah, kero. And maybe that’s all a show really has to accomplish in the end.
(Yes, “in the end” was another butt joke. I’m not proud of it.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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