Rate the last anime you watched out of 10

Yaaasss, love re-evaluations and knowing Bartender delivers on an adult anime. As you said, they are so rare that we can but hope the few we get are actually good.

It's now been a year since I ordered it I think, but I'm still very much interested in watching it.

Cocktails and chill, I guess
 
Aggretsuko all seasons

I finally got around to watching this absolute gem on Netflix and it was well worth it; first off this is rating not any individual seasons but all of the ones released thus far.

First off I at first didn't like the style but it eventually grew on me, for a long time I didn't like tween based 2D animation and I still am not the biggest fan, with that said I think it works well with the style that is presented; this was the reason it took me so long to get around to watching it though I recently started to broaden my horizons, getting back into western animated films after so many years of telling myself that I grew out of them, this shift in my preferences made me think it was time to give this show another chance as well and it was well worth doing so.

The story seems fairly simple on the surface, an anthropomorphic red panda (Retsuko) is doing accounting work for an anthro pig (Ton) who picks on her specifically because, reasons and Retsuko gets mad and lets it out doing heavy metal at the karaoke bar, but it becomes so much more than that, the characters have hidden depths that make them so much more than they seem on the surface; there are some characters who you will probably despise at first only for them to turn out ok later on, with one deranged exception but the exception gets his comeuppance very shortly after the fact.

I particularily like how the characters, despite being anthropomorphic animal characters, behave no different than humans and have to deal with very real human issues, very few shows/films/etc present anthro characters as proper people and it is good to have a show that does that for a change.
Another thing I like is how the episodes are not any longer than they need to be, I always felt like I could sit through more episodes than I usually do because they average around 15 minutes aproximately, cutting out the fluff.
The show is also really funny at times, and I don't usually laugh at many anime shows.

As for what I didn't like; I was not a fan of the heavy metal parts, I get they are Retsuko letting off steam but I couldn't help but cringe, especially when it is used to try and convince another character to take a certain point of view, I don't like it when characters sing for this purpose when they can just say it normally; this is perhaps my biggest gripe with the show but it gets less common as time goes on thankfully.

Regardless of this gripe I still had a blast watching the show, without saying too much it starts off pretty good in season 1 and mostly goes up from there, the ending of season 3 is particularily dark by this shows standards and season 4 gets really good in the second half; with season 5 just around the corner I have yet another thing to look forward to on Netflix.

Score 9/10
 
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Gosenzosama Banbanzai (1989)

Mamoru Oshii's esoteric and oddly personal postcard from the height of the economic bubble, is a tragi-comic satire following the breakdown of a middle-class family, whose lives are inextricably changed by the arrival of Maroko, a smiling young woman claiming to be the granddaughter of their teenage son, Inumaru, come from the future to meet him.

Oshii allegedly once said in the early 2000s that this was the only time he was ever given absolute freedom to do what he wanted, and that certainly seems to ring true. With its flatly composed shots, emphasis on lengthy character monologue and rampant breaking of the fourth wall, Gosenzosama is as much about recreating the feeling of watching a live stage play as anything else. As an experiment, it's often fascinating to look at and think about how the different storytelling techniques have transferred to animation, but as a piece of entertainment, I don't know that it's quite so successful. It's certainly funny at times and it's often thought provoking - this is clearly a series with something to say about Japanese society at the height of consumerist hubris - but with its lengthy expositional diatribes, it seems deliberately designed to try the viewer's patience, and any definite message it wants to convey remains frustratingly elusive. It's appropriate that one of the most noticeable visual tics is how the characters, particularly Inumaru and Maroko, have awkward limbs with clearly deliniated joints in the manner of marionettes; at least until the final moments, they never quite feel like people whose lives we can become invested in, they're just avatars there to move the plot along.

Much like the more recent Vlad Love, once it got past its initial gesture towards popularity, Gosenzosama feels like something Oshii made to satisfy his own curiosity about what it would look like, and without much interest in what anyone else thinks about it. If you're onboard with Oshii's particular vision, this is definitely worth seeking out, otherwise, it may just feel like a slog.

Interestingly, the series was later compiled into a film version released as Maroko! and I'd be curious to see how that compares. It feels like having this boiled down into a single 90 minute feature might be the better way to watch it.
 
Gundam Reconguista in G

An unexpected return to the Gundam franchise by its creator Yoshiyuki Tomino with mixed results. Reconguista definitely does not make a good first impression. The first few episodes are confusing and disjointed, bombarding you with information but providing little context and having wild tonal shifts that prevent you from understanding how to engage with it. All the while establishing tons of characters and with the mobile suits of these episodes easily being the worst in the series. But then it shapes up around Episode 7 and everything improves. In hindsight it's clearly structured like a series of films instead of a TV show. Every five or six episodes features a big change in the story, often coupled with an impressive action scene. Making Tomino's choice to revisit the series and re-adapt his own work more understandable.

Originally when I watched the series last year I ended up dropping it. But returning to it after getting used to Tomino's style and consuming his other works in the past year made me a lot more appreciative of this series' strengths. One of Reconguista's defining traits is the labyrinthine political tensions, lies and ever-changing alliances where everybody is working an angle and you have to wait to see who is lying and when. Which does make it feel like something that will need to be rewatched to fully understand but it does lead to several exciting moments where the cast have to gamble on who is and isn't reliable from their own faction. And while Tomino fleshes out this conflict he doesn't lose sight of the small moments. There's just a lot of little scenes and moments that made me really like the supporting cast. They might not be well developed but I like them a lot, be it Steer the bilingual helmwoman, the outlandish genius and moron Klim Nick, even the XO who only wears shorts and shades on the bridge. There's just a lot of likeable characters with excellent designs. And it's not just the humans, the mobile suits steadily improved throughout the entire show until you get to the final arc where there's so many good ones the story can barely give them any screen time. Getting to grips with the style and tone lead mets find a series bursting with flash effects, lovely setting details and an interesting setting.

It isn't perfect though. The broader conflicts are always layered and active while the personal conflicts don't develop and remain elusive. There are some twists and betrayals that are never explored in a character driven way. One of the core conflicts of the series is between Bellri and the elusive Captain Mask and it remains very one-sided. Despite how important it should feel Bellri never really has an opinion on Mask so it's hard to be invested in the struggle. And Bellri is generally really hard to connect with as a protagonist. I do enjoy the overall direction he takes and his attitude in the second half of the series. But he is a victim of the weak opening arc and it feels like he never recovers. It's hard to pin down what he actually wants and why. And while I'm fine with his mech, the G-Self, being overwhelmingly powerful but there is a point where Bellri just pulls out new tools without any build up to gain an advantage and it feels cheap. And while last few episodes make for a tightly packed climax the epilogueleaves much to be desired. I want to love it or at least find it funny but I don't think there's enough meat to it.

But I'm glad I finally completed the series. It was a very charming work with a lot of problems. It convinced me to order some of the movie versions on Blu Ray. Score - 7/10
 
More than a Married Couple, but not Lovers
I'm not usually a proponent of the three-episode rule. If a show doesn't grab me in the first episode, I drop it. This show opens with typical geek protagonist Jiro being paired with obnoxious gyaru Akari for their school's Marriage Practical, a course that requires students to live like married couples, where they're graded on how well they get along. This proves difficult for Jiro because Akari treats him like trash. I wavered on the edge of dropping it after the first episode because Akari was so insufferable, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

Akari, as you can probably tell from her hairstyle, is a tsundere. I've never seen one that deres so hard, so fast, and never goes back. By episode 3, Akari goes from insufferable to adorable. The conflict for the rest of the series is less about Jiro and Akari getting along, and more about the love polygon that the two of them become entangled in. To my surprise it quickly becomes one of the better romance shows of the year. Even its premise isn't that weird when you think of it in the context of a culture where arranged marriage used to be the norm. Why wouldn't you teach teenagers how to live with a complete stranger?

The main thing holding it back is a tonal issue. I'm all for fan service, but considering the innocence of the characters fumbling their way through their feelings, the show's approach to fan service can be jarringly sleazy in places. It's the kind of ecchi tone that you would expect a lesser series to take when it has nothing to offer in the story department, but this show not only doesn't need that crutch, it detracts from the strengths of its romantic drama. It ends up sitting in this awkward middle ground where it's either an unusually good ecchi show or an unusually ecchi drama.

The show covers a decent amount of ground in its 12 episodes, but as per usual don't expect a real ending from an adaptation of an ongoing manga.

7/10
 
^ I will definitely need to continue on with MtaMC; I watched the first two episodes at the beginning of the season and was liking it, but I just never got a chance to go back to it. Glad to hear its more a drama and not a full-on RomCom. And the ecchi will help satisfy my 'Dirty Old Man' cravings, lol. ;)
 
The Skull Man

Well, this is another show to fall victim to the curse of completely losing the plot towards the end.

I was kind of enjoying the early episodes of this despite reading a review that gave it a fairly low score (even though in the end it made sense why), it had an interesting mystery going for it and it didn't take itself too seriously to begin with, the skeleton man joke in episode 1 got a chuckle out of me, but as the show went on it got considerably more detatched from where the story seemed to be going, which would be fine if it at least kept on making sense; alas that was not to be.

Towards the end the show just loses it and has plot points that do not make any sense, at least to me, how is it that Hayato suddenly becomes super powerful when he puts on the skull mask?, how is it that suddenly it seems that the whole town is riddled with cultists as opposed to it being a somewhat small group like what was set up, unless I overlooked something (which is entirely possible as I was so bored by the time this happened), I don't feel like there is any explanation for this; this wouldn't have been an issue if the show was maybe a supernatural tale as opposed to a semi-grounded mystery.

One thing that is a bit hit or miss are the character designs; some of them are really cool, like the Skull Man himself, his mask kind of reminds me of the design for the lead character in Turrican a little bit, but on the other hand I often times get characters mixed up with each other as some of them just look so damn similar to one another; this issue makes it hard to tell who's who, which is never ideal unless it's intended, which I don't think is the case here.

To top it off, I was just plain bored by the end, though I did power through it, which is more than can be said for some anime, the whole show has several anime cliche's that hold it back even further and, though they didn't ruin the earlier episodes, they kept piling up and as a result I simply lost interest towards the end and was mindlessly slogging through the last few episodes wanting it to end; the earlier episodes are interesting enough to keep it afloat to an extent but in reality, the payoff feels, at least to me, so detatched from the setup that it doesn't feel worth sitting through even that.

Score 5/10
 
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On-Gaku

Hits the right notes.

I will confess it has been much harder for anime to entertain me as of late but occasionally one comes along and manages just that; I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece by any stretch but it was a mostly solid film from start to end.

First off, the style, this one is kind of unique in that it uses rotoscoping as opposed to typical anime techniques, it is not often that this is used in anime and even less often that it looks good but here the animators knew one of the key rules of rotoscoping which is, don't copy the images verbatim, as a result we have the chacters faces highly simplified, which gives a comedic effect, sure some characters look basically identical to one another but, unlike in the last anime I rated, this feels like it was done by design and furthermore, the important characters look different enough from one another so in this case it works.
The style also includes some highly detailed pastel art (at least I think it's pastel anyway) for the backgrounds, and in rare cases, the characters as well; this makes the film truly stand out from the average anime.

Not quite a part of the film itself but the rotoscoping also makes the behind the scenes content much more interesting than if it were just animated the usual way.

The film is actually pretty funny at times as well; like the time when the Kenji takes around a whole half a minute to respond to his friends, with that said, the aforementioned example is used maybe one too many times for my liking but it is amusing for the first few; then there's the bit where Kenji destroy's his guitar in front of a bunch of delinquents who want to fight him, put's his hand behind his head to the shock of the lead delinquent and brings out a recorder before flawlessly evading them while playing the recorder at the same time before leading them on a merry chase like he were the pied piper, scene's like this are absolutely bonkers in the right way and it just adds to the humour; while I never burst out laughing (I almost never do with anime to be fair) I was amused at the deadpan absurdity of it all.

The scene with the music festival is incredibly well animated for the style the film has and it even starts experimenting with different styles in the middle of it; here we also see what is easily the best music track in the film, with that said, I'll admit I was not exactly blown away by any of the music but perhaps that is part of the charm.

One other thing I like is how the film did not overstay it's welcome; it lasted around 70 minutes and that's about the right length for it, though there may be another reason for the length.
I was going for a 7 out of 10 but when I found out that it was made by an independent team, who spent 7 whole years on the project, I knew that I can appreciate it all the more so therefore I think it is worthy of a very solid.

8/10
 
My Hero Academia season 5

Season 4 doesn't seem to have been well liked, but I absolutely loved it from start to finish.

Season 5 was a big disappointment after that.

It starts off with a couple of pretty boring episodes, then launches into yet ANOTHER fighting tournament - the third one in the series so far.

Tournaments in anime just never interest me. Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Yu Yu Hakusho, whatever - I don't care. I want things to be happening. I want the characters to be going to different places and doing stuff, not just fight after fight after fight.

This tournament dragged the Class B characters back into the spotlight for a while. I guess you might enjoy it more if you like those people, but I'm not too bothered about them either way and a load of episodes about good guys fighting good guys just for something to do isn't very exciting to me.

There are a few cool moments in the tournament, but it drags on for too long. There's a lot of focus on one particular character who was very rarely seen before, then isn't seen or mentioned again once the tournament finishes.

Then the show moves back onto all the Hero Agency stuff again - which again, is nothing we've not already seen before. It's slow paced with a lot of family drama stuff. It starts to feel like Eastenders with funny costumes and Endeavor instead of Phil Mitchell.

This is followed by a run of five episodes I really really enjoyed. They were a welcome change of tone and focused on some of my favourite characters. The season really got back on track with those episodes and definitely raised my rating a few points.

Then the last episode is another boring/slightly odd one where the main purpose seems to be introducing us to the heroes and showing us what their powers are. It's a bit late for that.

That's a problem the season has overall - it assumes no one has ever watched the show before. Over and over and over, we get freeze frames with a voiceover telling us the character's real name, their hero name, the name of their power, what that power does and - in the case of the pros - what their hero ranking is. They have to tell us this stuff repeatedly, just in case we forget.

Imagine you're a few seasons into Breaking Bad and every episode, it suddenly pauses for a few seconds to announce "Walter White! Drug dealer name: Heisenberg! His ability is making drugs and selling drugs! Drug dealer rank: #1!" - it would be a nuisance.

It's not an awful season, but things could have been a lot tighter. Nothing really happens for the first part. The tournament is long and mostly pointless. The My Villain Academia episodes saved the season from being a bore TBH.

I just really hope the next season is more lively - 6/10
 
Junji Ito Maniac

I'll confess, I don't actually read manga (though I have seen images of the odd Junji Ito drawing from time to time); I'm not much of a book/comic person and the B&W presentation is often used in stories that should be more colourful such as One Piece or Dragon Ball; with that said, there is one genre it is perfect for and that is horror; however, as I don't read manga, this is my entry point into the world of one of the greatest horror minds in Japan and I liked it quite a lot, though that may have been down to the sheer strength of the source material.

First off I really like the episodic format; I feel that episodic formats make TV shows fly by as opposed to one massive narrative that has to hold my attention for such a long time; maybe the odd episode will be a bit pants, but there is then a very real possibility that the one after will be a masterpiece, I don't have to get hung up on a bad story for long; above all else though, this format pretty much allows a story to get to the point incredibly quickly and not have to take a long time building up.

Did this manage to scare me though? ...ehh; I will say this, this show is perhaps the closest anime I have seen to pulling it off, the Mysterious Tunnel story definitely came close, I think Junji Ito's stories may well have what it takes and I think a lot of that can be chalked up to the fact that Junji Ito understands that explaining the scare basically ruins it; I can recall all too many times I would watch Doctor Who and it gives a scientific explanation to nearly every one of it's horror episodes; I often like the fact that DW does that for it's less spooky episodes but when focusing on horror, it is better that it is beyond the viewers comprehension.

In Junji Ito's stories; scary things happen and there is little to no explanation, normally I like to understand the story but the magic of these stories is that I can understand the things I need to understand while the things that are better off making no sense, indeed, make no sense.

In terms of the quality of the adaptation though; it's not great, the Hanging Balloons look ridiculous with their toon shaded CGI and said CGI pops up again in Tomb Town, I am aware that the manga does not have this issue, so that is generally the way to enjoy these stories for anyone who doesn't mind reading rather than watching; the 2D parts are ok enough for me personally and thankfully the CGI is rare, but neither can match up to the quality of what little I have glimpsed of the manga.
The audio is pretty good; it's fairly standard horror fare but it is suitably creepy and is the one thing the manga doesn't have; being a book and all.

Also the stories are not all as good as each other; the debut episode was more amusing than scary and Soichi's episodes felt more like comic relief than horror; on the flip side, we have Tomb Town which is really good and the aforementioned Mysterious Tunnel episode came pretty close to actually managing to scare me.

Overall I originally planned to watch just one episode of this before finishing Big Order, only to literally watch a whopping 8 episodes back to back; this is incredibly rare for an anime though I am aware that it boils down largely to Junji Ito's source material being so good; the adaptation quality could be better but these stories are just so good that I had an absolute blast watching regardless; my opinion may have been different had I read the manga but I didn't so I personally give this an.

8/10
 
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The anime I'm currently watching is "A Certain Scientific Railgun T". I didn't know it was the third season of this title and I'm really enjoying it, especially lovely Misaka. I've recently ordered the first two seasons on Blu-ray. Because of Misaka, I couldn't help but order the sexy figurine of her in a bunny girl outfit.

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What is it with all thes figures with bunny suit versions, they really are prolific, even in the 18+ figures I tend to peruse online, lol. I suppose they are somewhat sexy, but for some reason they don't do a whole lot for me. I'm not really a fan of Scientific Railgun, I think I dropped it late in the first season, but I did always like to see Mikasa when she was wearing her leg warmers, I think I find that even more appealing than a bunny suit. She definitely has a bit of an electric personally though, for sure! :)

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Girls with Guns said:
What is it with all thes figures with bunny suit versions, they really are prolific, even in the 18+ figures I tend to peruse online, lol. I suppose they are somewhat sexy, but for some reason they don't do a whole lot for me. I'm not really a fan of Scientific Railgun, I think I dropped it late in the first season, but I did always like to see Mikasa when she was wearing her leg warmers, I think I find that even more appealing than a bunny suit. She definitely has a bit of an electric personally though, for sure! :)

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She wore leg warmers? Nice.

As for the bunny girl outfits, my opinion is that creators think of what sort of outfit on female characters will draw attention, especially the kind of characters that you wouldn't think wearing such outfits. If you think of someone shy like Maina Ichii, would someone ever think of her wearing a bunny girl outfit, with maybe a facial expression that says "I'm not sure if this outfit suits me"? Maybe not but if one did surface, it would get attention. Plus, bunny girl outfits emphasise the figure.

When I was looking for figures of Misaka, there was one where she was wearing a frilly two-piece swimsuit with the top resembling a crop top and it didn't grab my attention.

But when I saw the bunny girl figure, my eyes nearly popped out of my head: "The thought of Misaka wearing that? OH MY!!!"
 
Lol, it was basically just a rhetorical question - I wasn't really looking for any in-depth explanations, we all know why they put figures in bunny suits! Now, if the bunny suit on that Misaka figure you bought was cast-off, then that would've been a bit more appealing to me, haha! ;)

adamclark83 said:
She wore leg warmers? Nice.
Click to expand...
Yes, she wears leg warmers... lots of her figures have them, too.

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Oh, when you said she wore leg warmers, i instantly thought you were talking about leggings which would be nice to see her wear.
But it's really amazing the price differences for all the stores that sold that Misaka figure I bought. Also, some were saying it was already in stock but others saying it's due for release this year.
 
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