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I cannot believe there are no reviews here...

Minky Momo OVAs from the 90s were something else, it's almost on par (if not surpassing) Sailor Moon as a representative classic of the genre, I have yet to watch the full TV version to finally judge, but it's just such fine storyweaving, these are stories one wants to fall into and dream about, it's really magical. I'm assuming it's been given the rightful status it deserves in Japan, but it seems to be quite underrated and unheard of apart from there, we should appreciate it more.

The structure here is about a magical station that captures the souls ... and memories of those who pass it and keeps them in limbo. Minky Momo and her cousin surrogate cross each other in a symmetrically playful way, the station is in the center of the town and seems to have a metaphysical connection somewhere else. It's interesting and one of the handful incidents for me personally in anime where in synchronicity I encounter something I experienced recently somewhere else. In this case, today I was reading on the Venus eight-year harmonic and the shape it makes in space (just like the shape of the colorful glass dome of the station above the "lion" statue, ha!), sacred geometry is everywhere indeed.

Please watch this and think of your dearest dreams.

Wow, who thought one day I'd see the effect of Kieslowski in anime? The dynamics of art and abstraction are so strange, and that's part of the magic. The story revolves around several elements, mainly a bridge and kite with a child that works as a "love knot" there, it's remarkable how well written and directed this is for an OVA. But then again, the minds behind it are the makers of classics like Pokemon, Maison Ikkoku and Windaria.

This played with my emotions so gently, just like a child would play around and have fun with you. Minky Momo seems to be in a special ... category within the magical girl formula, I remember seeing some episodes of the TV series dubbed in Arabic as a kid, there's a certain maturity to it that's in harmony with its targeted audience, I like that sort of awareness. Really good stuff.

I cannot recommend it enough, be prepared though for your heart to be gently squeezed.

Haha this is so messy it's almost worthwhile. Japanese intuition is intriguing, even with bad examples like these. Here we have the Alice in Wonderland template, dissected and thrown against several unripe narratives, mainly evolving around an "album" that works as a portal to another world, though it's partly causing the music from the first world to disappear, pun is seriously not indented lol, that's how it really is, it's actually written based on a real band and album. The premise is engaging indeed, but it feels like a surreal aesthetic mix of "post-punk" from the 80s and dungeon myths, it's even weirder than that ... if you pay close attention to all the details, plenty of mainstream references too.

To add more to the strangeness, the heroine is named Carol while her mean friend is the one named Alice, though the former has the prototype Alice look, she even meets a rabbit in the other world who helps her. This is the part most fascinating to me, as I follow the evolution of the Alice narrative in general. I like though that they turned around the princess saved by a knight stereotype into the complete opposite, the princess is the one who saves the knight, and finally they join to defeat the monster.

I wouldn't recommend it, unless you’re weird or consuming magic mushrooms while watching.

This came as a surprise. I often mention "folding" in my anime and film reviews, it's a term coined by some cognitive scientists who study the film industry, it can be roughly defined as the dynamics of how we create stories on different levels of abstraction, especially using a visual vocabulary, sometimes it's too obvious it verges on the ironic, but it's to my utmost interest when it's done very subtly the normal viewer wouldn't notice it usually. Anime and manga is semi-primitive compared to cinema in this.

Here's a classic example though, the folding is explicitly ironic, we have in the 3rd episode a show ... within a show, filmed as a play inside the dorm of the students, it's clever fan service and narrative twists and turns for girls who love to see pretty boys around each other, it's worth observing compared to other examples, and there's a spark of innovation with the role of a mangaka who actually caused all of the narrative around this specific fold, that's something. Midori, Evangelion and Millennium Actress tried to explore that more creatively. There's also another folding device with a sensitive girl ghost who enters the fantasy of one of the boys, possibly mirrored by a soap opera show one of the characters is watching. I also liked how the characters developed and grew within each other.

It's lite and fun stuff, but I'd recommend it only if you're interested in the making of the thing than the final result itself.

This is obviously bad, but I'm generous enough to rate it as average. I watch lots of stuff indiscriminately for encyclopedic and analytical reasons, I'm usually interested in the dynamics of creation themselves, sometimes my inner narrative creeps into the thing thus a subjective one or half points are given.

I love these old OVAs from the 80s and 90s, they're products of a certain era and energy that's possibly not going to come back, the bubble economy was in its resting phase, European aesthetics and obsessions were rampant and explicit, characters moved and looked differently, rather more realistic. Most anime characters now look alien or ... robotic in worst cases, makes you think.

It's a bizarre mess, no doubt. The story is set in a port town with European classical architecture, yet all the characters look like they came straight out of a commercial district in Tokyo, we even have punk gangs with motorcycles who actually happen to be the good guys along the little girl! I rated this higher solely because of Miho, the child who actually weaved the whole thing with her fashion drawings, it's always fun to observe self-referential awareness, especially in these types of low quality projects where you don't expect it at all, that's one of the reasons why I watch many bad stuff if you're ever wondering.

But there's something dark about this as well, the subtle incest and pedophilia. It's like completely different stories are slammed against one another, pay attention to the parts about the old guy and his family, also the sexualization of Miho, so weird and icky but one wants to understand. Then we have the innocent dream of the little girl that saves the whole thing, it's so pure and beautiful if you contrast it with the other aforementioned dark narrative, forget the silly fashion and Cinderella references, they're cloaks for something far more sinister, so strange and haunting if you view it this way.

The art and characters are based on other magical girl series from Pierrot Studio.

So I've finally managed to watch Sailor Moon. I think it's essential to watch at least one of the first three seasons by any serious anime viewer. I watched it for several reasons, but mainly because I wanted to understand the phenomenon, girls were crazy about it in the 90s, and it changed its own genre. It was also franchised by many companies for toys, cosmetics and god knows what else. To my knowledge, it was Disney who first started this soft intermingling between fictional narratives and commerce. This kind of stuff gets my attention from a purely analytical and social perspective.

But don't get me ... wrong, it's fun. Especially viewed at this point of time, to see projects that encourage girls to be powerful and beautiful within their natural gender roles. Unlike in the West, Japanese people are not obsessed or overtaken by abstract reasoning, they toy with it and eventually make it subject to order and symmetry. They understand the polarity and dualism of our reality, they don't make a fuss about it.

That aside, three things make it effective and worthwhile: Astrology as indirect annotation and driving force of the narrative, even if superficial, it works. Then we have the possibility of the whole thing being different levels of a single arcade game, big part of it is actually placed in an arcade centre, even the communication station is situated there, and the story is seeded by Sailor V whom Usagi always play her game there as well, supervised by a blonde named Motoki, it's important to observe this because here is the main folding device in my opinion. Finally we have the delicate overlaying of the myth that created this story (or is it the "game" creating it?), that is the Silver Millennium narrative, it's the part most intriguing to me, especially how the memories were revived in the imagination of the main characters, so beautiful.

I know this might sound trivial or even incomprehensible by many readers here, but I have to note that I'm mostly interested in the structuring and making of the thing than the stories themselves. Totally recommended, you can trust your little ones with it.

I'm interested in the spacious area between the audience and the art itself, I do believe both contribute to one another more than we'd assume. Few intelligent artists do that consciously. This series is special to me for several reasons, along the high quality that stands by itself. I watched this anime at a period when I was starting to be aware of life's darker hues for the first time, as an adolescent facing and reasoning the hardships and questions of life, just like the main characters here. That's why it resonated with me and was tinted by my own perception to an extent.

There are ... a lot of things that makes it worth watching, but the first that come to my mind is how natural elements were involved in the shaping and driving of the plot! Notice what's happening when the sun is coming down, or the cherry blossoms are scattered, or the rain is falling or the birds and their shadows are reflected. It was done consciously and that's why it's so effective, I doubt we'll ever come across any anime that does so on this level, you'll never see any sunsets in anime like the ones here, the colour punctuation is to die for. (This is a hint, as sunsets will play a central role in the narrative the viewer will experience around the last ten episodes).

There's particularly a scene I will never forget its composition, it's when Mariko attacked Aya with the paper cutter, and the way the emotions escalated while Fukiko-sama was playing the piano at the same time. The whole thing is created by the "capricious fairy" of fate through inanimate objects, metaphorically by the piano (Fukiko-sama) and the clocktower (Rei), whom their mystery is the center of the whole story. All the sub-characters are shaped in one way or another by that relationship. It's almost devastating to analyse these two characters, I've never came across such stark depiction of loneliness in anime as done here. The way two lonely people were trying to heal each other despite their damages and wounds, let alone the fact they're siblings. Those obsessing over it being merely incestuous and homosexual prove they didn't get it.

Finally, we have the role of Nanako. Just like the poupée given by Fukiko-sama to Rei; she's a transparent vessel with almost no character though she's the one knotting the fates of everyone else. We actually live with her and witness how she grow, just to be blown away again by the end as she intensify the mystery of her being, even then we barely know her, which makes her more powerful. I can't applaud enough for such character development and writing.

Technically, it has its low moments, like the annoyingly fast and repeatedly moving still images and zooms at heightened drama, the laughingly large and foamy tears, etc. It baffles me how the Japanese would fall for that trap as they're masters of minimalism on many levels, why would they do that? Just ignore it and you'll have a masterpiece of a fading artform we'll probably not see anytime soon.

This has to be the most unique vampire story I've known so far in anime. The narrative is so rich it could branch out and nest other narratives within the main plot, but there isn't enough awareness and craftsmanship in the execution to reach those higher levels, but we are content.

What I love about this story, as I mentioned in my other comment on the TV edition, is the gentle and eloquent situating of sadness, both in the images and the stories within, and it's crucial to mention that the "visual poetry" is of higher caliber on the OVA, while in the TV edition the ... "narrative poetry" is far more prevalent. In this version, we are missing an ingredient most important, that is the Western shinma and their connection to Larva, only a brief and sketchy appearance of one in the third episode, unlike the memory embossing and haunting passages we have of them in the TV edition (that blonde girl with a conch on the flying sea ship). On the other hand, the traditional calligraphy role is far more better here, giving some of the most chilling and almost dancing-like performance of fighting scenes, resembling the movement of brush and paper cutting, emphasizing the Kabuki reference, it's almost talismanic and ceremonial at one point. The only parts of the narrative here that I can applaud are the ones in the first and second episodes, I can contemplate on such stories and images all day.

I'm quite aware that not many see what I'm seeing in this anime, and despite the technical inconsistency here and there; I guarantee it's worthy of your time to meditate on these ephemeral streams of blood, ink and tears, try giving it a chance. I'm crossing my fingers that the original manga will be the one nearing or attaining perfection.

Note: might contain some spoilers.

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Visual treat of the highest order.

I'm not in position to talk about the divergence between the manga and anime, so I'll just review this movie as a separate piece of art on its own. Any so-called "otaku" who doesn't rate this highly (at least for the visuals) is a questionable one for that matter. I'm absolutely head over heels in love with this movie! It has different personal interests of mine, all combined in one place: retrofuturism, Art Deco, and reflexive reasoning on the AI question.

This particular story doesn't go very deep, but it offers the questions we all ask in ... a simple and rather elegant way. Even the emotions are stripped and toned down to their proper places. Tima is the potential of human intelligence, and how that is capable of high creativity and the utmost destruction as well; where do we set the limits? Kenichi is the twin brother of intelligence, that is emotions, and both cannot function without the other, that's the secret of their relationship, and that's why he was handed over her heart by the end. But that's just my perspective, each viewer will reason his way through the plot and its loaded questions and metaphors.

Another thing that I liked about this project is how it stayed true to the conceptual signature of Tezuka's work, those timeless curvatures. It's also loaded with cinema's golden age references, and even 'Dr. Strangelove' ending reference was there. Clever superimposed mnemonic scenes when characters are recalling certain memories as black and white film snippets.

I can't applaud enough for everyone who worked on this project, it's a must watch for anyone seriously interested in animation.

Haunting, deep and clever. I know it gets formulaic and sketchy sometimes throughout, as many TV anime did at that time, but the core and most importantly the emotions are of such great pull, you just can't pass by it. Also, it has that Japanese signature mood of gentle sadness, if that makes any kind of sense. But the way this is structured is worthy of praise, even if it was wholly done on intuitive level.

So many elements and details I like are present here, it's just so innately Yamato-damashii. I can understand if many don't see much of what I'm referring to though, but ... try to watch it the same way I did. The whole thing as an episodic Kabuki performance, which we suddenly find ourselves in, only to be revealed around the final three episodes, and within the acts are what could've been logographic or symbolic representations of evil (mannequins, dolls, flowers, etc), that is the Shinma themselves. And you can see how the traditional calligraphy is constantly emphasized, but the weakness here is in the animation of the demons and fight sequences, so much could've been done, at least partly resembling the way they were made in the intro, like ink shadows.

It's rewarding nonetheless, the character engineering and development, the psychological darkness not being all over the place, with superb voice acting in the original Japanese. Then there's the role and effect of side characters on driving the main plot (Chisato, Larva, Reiha), something I've come to appreciate and notice more often recently, just plain good writing.