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Non Non Biyori is always great at eliciting a range of bittersweet emotions along with an incredible sense of calm and serenity...plus just enough humor to keep things fresh and unsentimental. This OVA is no different, and my only disappointment is that we may never get any more stories from this incredible little country town.

The first part of the OVA is devoted to homework, and the second to Nattsun's desire to start a badminton club. When you find out why she was inspired to do this, it's an especially sweet moment...but then again that entire half of the OVA is packed with great material. Not every character gets to shine in this single episode, but there are lots of cameos to at least ensure few characters are overlooked or forgotten.

Stay until the very end to get a small ray of hope.

It's always sad for anything in Non Non Biyori to end, but don't forget that you can watch everything again from the start. This OVA means that you have one more small gem to add to that rewatch list, and for that I'm thankful.

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This was not a good show.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

If you want to watch a bunch of annoying children and a cultist handle some low stakes adventures on a space station, feel free. There are two absolutely intolerable social media influencers, a kid who's also some kind of secret agent, a bunch of useless adults...and a comet. Just wait until you find out about that!

The plot, such as it is, involves throwing random situations up in the air and hoping they land. There's no sense of real danger and everything is played out as comedy. I'll give the writing credit for addressing realistic situations that might occur in a crisis on a space station, but when half the time is spent on childish antics, it's hardly as if you particularly care.

The art is pretty nice, but that's all I can say. If you're under the age of 12 then I'm sure this would be fun. Otherwise it's laughably simplistic and offers the viewer nothing of substance.

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This is a manly anime about a very masculine private detective who likes boxing, women, drinking, betting on the ponies, and other things that make a man a real man. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. If you want to watch a somewhat entertaining Japanese anime take on old American hardboiled detective stories then please feel free to check this out. It's lacking in story quality and the animation is...rudimentary...but they do get the atmosphere right. It's a decent adventure through late night bars, shady meetings with sketchy clients, some solid male bonding accomplished through violence, and a bit of casual sex on the side. As long as you're not expecting a satisfying conclusion to the story and just want to be distracted for 45 minutes then this is just fine. But I really can't say it actually deserves a decent score given the overall cheap feel of the production and lack of interest in coming up with a decent script.

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My primary purpose in writing this review is to convince you that Bouken Shite mo Ii Koro is a waste of your time. Don't bother watching this junk. While it's billed as a comedy, the OVA series is basically a hentai. It's poorly animated, dreadfully written, and relies on sexual assault, coerced sex, and rape for titillation. All of this is presented in a light-hearted manner as if it's the most normal, healthy thing in the world.What's unfortunate is that, in the hands of anyone with a modicum of talent, things could have been very different. A sex comedy about an underdog porn studio trying to make it big has a lot of potential for an ecchi anime. In fact, there's one really clever sequence where they're trying to film a scene on public transportation (illegally, of course) and have to flee the scene when they get busted. If they'd focused more on that kind of material then this could have been a somewhat decent show at any rate. Instead, the focus on creepy sex scenarios and juvenile "humor" render it practically without worth. If you're looking for comedy or actually sexy content, save yourself the 135 minutes I wasted and see something else.

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Junk Head is an extraordinary achievement of stop-motion animation. Its influences range from art cinema to B-grade horror films and post-apocalyptic video games, but there's nothing quite like it out there. Created almost entirely by one man, Takahide Hori, Junk Head is a journey through a nightmarish underground landscape of ruins, caverns, and decaying industrial infrastructure inhabited by grotesque sentient humanoids and even more twisted and repulsive predators who lurk in the dark.

The story is fairly simple, involving the extremely perilous adventures of a future "human" who volunteers for a dangerous mission into the unknown, His travels deep underneath the Earth's surface reveal a phantasmagoric, meticulously detailed underworld with its own social structure, belief system, and far more deadly threats than anyone could desire. Life is cheap in this underground labyrinth and the film doesn't shy away from the many interesting ways in which living creatures can meet their end. Adding to this sense of utter alienation from anything resembling our own reality, the characters all speak in various invented languages made of harsh, guttural sounds. You are relentlessly assaulted with the fact that this world, even though it's still called Earth, might as well be as alien as any planet from science fiction.

Thankfully, Junk Head offers much more than a hellscape of misery and terror. Takahide Hori has a wonderfully playful sense of humor, sometimes dark, often quite silly, and frequently rather subtle. He also clearly cares about the many oddly shaped misfits who star in the film. They're all given personalities, motivations, and often some real dignity. They're just trying to do their best in an environment that's pretty much out to kill them at every turn. The film is never sentimental, but it invests the struggles and actions of the characters with genuine weight and significance. This movie is not just mere spectacle for its own sake.

While Junk Heap is by no means the kind of film most people on this site would expect, I hope it gains a new audience of fans from the MAL community. The film is audacious in the scope of its execution and offers the kind of pleasures that popular entertainment rarely does. Hopefully Junk Heap will encourage some anime fans to delve into other forms of animation storytelling more deeply (I would especially recommend Jan Svankmajer). And if nothing else, maybe you'll have some intriguingly unique dreams in days to come.

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This is just a nice, short comedic interlude that's not essential viewing...but it is a lot of fun. In short, Tanya and her unit are stationed in the middle of the desert, Water is scarce and their diet is monotonous. So, in a brilliantly stupid way to improve morale and vary their combat rations, the military high command ships in an incalculable quantity of dried pasta. The rest of the story involves the crazy lengths to which Tanya and her mages go to make said pasta tasty. Mayhem ensues.

If you like Youjo Senki then this is a nice treat while we all wait for the second season. It'll give you a few laughs and it looks really nice too. I can only hope we get a few more of these in the future.

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Why am I giving such a low score to a movie that so many people love? It's pretty simple: If you have't already read the source material this whole thing is going to be incoherent. Very little is fleshed out or explained, there's a huge time skip, and no relationships are defined at all. I'm syre that this is satisfying fan service for those who read the series, but if you're judging it as a stand-alone anime project it fails completely.

The animation is nice enough and everything else is of good quality, but I can't recommend this if you're anime only like me. It's just a bunch of random scenes strung together. It's not a real story.

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There's little horror to be seen in this anthology of three short stories involving ineffectual male characters and their interactions with a mysterious woman named Mumako who grants their wishes...with a twist.

The animation style is pedestrian at best, and drawn more like a gag comedy anime than horror. The stories are not in the least bit scary, offering at best a vague surprise in the end, but prepare to be unimpressed.

Basically this is a waste of your time. It's dull, not scary, and the art and music are barely doing the minimum. There are plenty of actually decent one-shot horror releases from the 80s and 90s so don't spend half an hour on this one.

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Eizouken is a blast of 100% DIY, punk rock energy in anime form. Once the first notes of “Easy Breezy” play, you know you’re in for something genuinely different, and things just get better from there. The three high school girls of Eizouken, determined to make anime at any cost, embody in every line of their animated existence an irrepressible energy that can’t help but translate into an emotionally moving and compulsively watchable journey for anyone willing to jump on board for the crazy ride.

And a wild ride exactly what you get. While Eizouken doesn’t wave away the details that go into making animation, it’s not too concerned with the day-to-day operations (unlike the exemplary series Shirobako). Instead, Eizouken is more focused on the intense drive to create, and the frustrations that inevitably arise when irrepressible imagination confronts implacable reality. Luckily, a lot of Machiavellian scheming and some old-fashioned blunt coercion on the part of Kanamori Sayaka, who takes the part of the team’s producer, keeps things careening along towards their goals.

Meanwhile, on the fully unhinged side, we have Asakusa Midori, the character who’s really the driving force behind the whole crazy anime project. She regularly pulls ideas out of her notebooks and engages her friends in absolutely joyful flights through imagined landscapes, improvising wildly along the way. As these fantasies unfold, the focus is on how all three girls contribute to create a shared, vibrant, and cohesive world. Technical problems are solved (or cleverly “explained” away), and everyone has a role in getting to the “end” until it all starts up again the next day.

While Asakusa’s imagined world is lovely, and highly reminiscent of Miyazaki Hayao’s sketches, the actual world of the characters is just as compelling in its own way. Canals run through apartment complexes, the high school’s faculty office room is an abandoned swimming pool, and the city in which our characters run riot exists as a chaotic warren of narrow passages, secret escape routes, barely stable architecture, and tantalizing vistas of a semi-drowned metropolis. It’s our world in a way, but beautifully transformed. It teases familiarity while always reminding us that something’s just not quite right. Mostly, it makes me want to go exploring. It doesn’t even matter if I never figure out the mysteries of Eizouken’s world; isn’t it enough to just visit and maybe make some new friends?

Preferably, it’d be nice to make the acquaintance of Asakusa Midori, the impossibly electric creative talent; Kanamori Sayaka, Asakusa’s affectionately cynical and practical-minded best friend; and Mizusaki Tsubame, who’s determined to become an animator despite her rich parents’ objections. The show wastes little time on polite introductions, overly complex back stories, or endless complications based on contrived misunderstandings or the dreaded “character who’s so shy it takes 12 episodes to get her to smile” trope.

Instead, we get three unique individuals who just decide to say “what the hell” and see what happens. Interpersonal conflicts and developments that occur develop naturally as they get to know each other, but they keep focused on the main thing: they are absolutely 100% making anime. For real. And it’s that dedication to the joy of shared creation, the excitement of pursuing a dream sheerly because it makes you feel so damn alive, that elevates these three girls far above the grim archetypes that haunt most seasonal anime productions. They are all, in their own ways, fully alive.

Eizouken is a love story dedicated to animation as an expressive medium and as a source of emotional connection, drawn with such energy and blissful abandon that one only encounters work of this quality every few years at best. While an anime series that’s about making anime might not seem appealing to everyone, this show is really just about the thrill of new friends and the incomparable exhilaration of experiencing a new creation just as it takes flight. Shows like this remind me why I love anime.

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While Ziggy isn't exactly good, it deserves attention from those who have a taste for the kind of wild, anything goes type of anime that was easily available in the 80s/early 90s OVA scene. The plot's absurd, the characters are barely developed, and the animation is mediocre, but who cares? You get to watch a Japanese hair metal band run around London, play bad songs, and clear themselves of murder charges! The film contains some unintentional comedy at its finest and deserves a viewing (preferably after a few drinks).

There are a lot of great moments in Ziggy just waiting for well-deserved mockery, like the band playing an impromptu concert while on the run from the police, and a hilariously sexist and clueless scene where the members of an all-female punk-ish band giggle around in the kitchen, happily cooking a big meal for the all-male members of Ziggy and some assorted British punk dudes. You will also learn, again and again and again, about how important it is to never stop rockin'.

To be fair, the people in charge of this production weren't completely deluded into thinking an audience would hail this fiasco as being great art. Once you learn why Ziggy's been framed for murder, it's pretty clear that the whole movie's just meant to be a joke. The big reveal is genuinely hilarious and in the best tradition of campy films featuring rock bands. There's an aerial battle that takes absurdity to new levels, and plenty of other deliberately ludicrous moments leading to the grand finale.

I had a lot of fun watching this little gem and definitely recommend it for a certain kind of anime fan. Ziggy is never dull. You'll be laughing (or at least cringing) all the way through. Just don't expect it to be anything more than what it is: an obscure bit of anime that manages to entertain despite itself.

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