Back to Graine's Profile Graine's Profile

Sep 1, 2021
Preliminary (4/26 eps)
If you have ever seen a shounen anime and dedicated some time to thinking about what makes these shows tick, Demon Slayer will offer absolutely nothing new for you. There is not a single creative idea in it. You might be thinking: "I don't care about creative - I just want something that's slick and well executed". The problem with that, is that you could still do way better than this.

Given the (alleged) physical superiority of the demons, I was hoping we would see the main characters playing it smart and using some underhanded tactics to defeat their enemies, but no. In Demon Slayer, ...
Aug 23, 2021
Mixed Feelings
What the movie gets right in terms of visuals and artistry, is counterbalanced by it's failures in storytelling. We, as the audience, don't know what the central players in the story want. We don't really get to understand what the end goal of SEELE or Gendo Ikari is and how the different ways one would initiate Human Instrumentality and/or 3rd Impact would really differ from one another. The audience doesn't know what is at stake or which side to root for (if any) and thus it is very difficult to feel invested in what is going on on a literal level.

The movie manages to maintain ...
Aug 22, 2021
No spoilers or detailed story analysis here. Just my personal thoughts, written down, after re-watching the show after 15 years.

The show is a celebration of neat sci-fi ideas, great setting, memorable characters and some crazy fun fight sequences. It's also visual story telling brought to near perfection. A single scene of silence or a change in facial expression in NGE can conjure more emotion out of me than any amount of tug-at-your-heart-strings monologue in an average anime show.

But there's a "but" to all of it. Towards the finish line, the story stumbles and becomes so cold and jaded that it starts to feel very hard-to-connect-with. ...
Feb 21, 2019
Tenjou Tenge (Manga) add
You can have a simple and fun martial arts action story with tons of nudity and violence with a high school backdrop. Or you can have a darker adult-oriented narrative, where the characters are dealing with great supernatural threats in a constantly deepening plot filled with twists and turns. You can't have it both ways. This is Tenjou Tenge's biggest downfall. It's an impossible mixture of things that just don’t blend.

A lot of the characters that the story fools you into becoming invested in are eventually tossed to the sidelines or reduced to mere spectators until the very end where the series hastily tries to ...
Sep 13, 2014
Mixed Feelings
First things first: I have never read Hellsing manga in it's entirety. I've heard that Hellsing Ultimate remains rather faithful to the source material, but other than that, I can't really comment on the issue. Therefore, I'm gonna review this as a standalone piece of entertainment, rather than reviewing it as an adaption of the manga. I have watched the original anime numerous times and it was the series that really got me into anime, so it goes without saying that the Hellsing franchise is very dear to me.

The production values of Hellsing Ultimate are great. The animation is fluent and the style is pleasant ...


It’s time to ditch the text file.
Keep track of your anime easily by creating your own list.
Sign Up Login