I watched both seasons of Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (henceforth referred to as simply Rakugo). Here are my thoughts:

As someone who likes any kind of theater as well as traditional Japanese culture, and often enjoys josei works, I expected that I would enjoy Rakugo.

The show takes place during a transformative time (mid-20th century) in the history of Japanese media. Older, more-traditional forms of entertainment have been overtaken by television and radio. For those who don't know, rakugo is basically a style of traditional Japanese stage performance which involves verbal storytelling. The main focus of the anime is the practice of rakugo, hence the title. Somebody with greater knowledge of rakugo might appreciate the nuances of the show more than I did.

The story of the anime is complex and intelligent. There are many well-developed characters, each of whom has their own motivations and feelings. The dynamics of these characters are woven together to create a rich character-driven story. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, the writing suffers from a serious flaw, in my opinion. Although the characters are complex, they are still boring and very often unlikable. I didn't empathize with any of the characters, nor did I enjoy any of their personalities. In fact I detested some of the most important characters. This is an admittedly subjective but nevertheless serious problem for a highly character-focused show such as this. My distaste for the cast seriously impaired my enjoyment of this anime. There is a buffet of hateable characters in this show to pick from. There were multiple characters for whom I came to loathe their appearance on-screen. This is true for both seasons of the anime. Another thing worth mentioning is that a lot of the plot mechanisms through which drama is derived are cheesy soap-opera material. This isn't an objectively bad thing (I'm fine with cheesy drama), but it does clash starkly with the show's sophisticated reputation.

Much like the practice of rakugo itself, the delivery of a story is as important as its content. At its core, this show has an okay story (regardless of the character issues). However, I think it could have been executed much better. I am fine with slow pacing in anime, as long as the screentime is used in some way that delivers value

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I watched both Barakamon and Handa-kun(partially). Although it aired ~2 years afterwards, Handa-kun is the prequel to Barakamon. My thoughts on both anime are provided below, beginning with Barakamon.

Barakamon:
The comedy is both unfunny and frequent - the worst possible combination. There is a lot of comedy in this anime and my distaste for its flavour is probably a significant reason for my lack of enthusiasm for the show.

Fairly generic SoL characters. Character interaction, particularly for the MC with the rest of the cast, is one thing that the anime does an okay job of. Additionally, the antics of the kids in the show are kind of cute I guess. My favourite characters are Tamako, Miwa, and Naru. Otherwise, the rest of the cast is totally forgettable.

In terms of direction, the tone of the show is all over the place. I feel like I get whiplash sometimes by the way the mood of the show jumps around. Additionally, as I already said, the comedy is excessive and interferes with a lot of potentially emotional or sentimental moments.

Bland art style and unremarkable animation. The OST is similarly unremarkable although the OP and ED songs are okay.

The VA for the young girl character (Naru) does a good job, aside from this the voice acting is unremarkable. Actually, the MC has a deep and sexy voice but that's probably irrelevant to the anime's artistic value. I find the MC in this strangely attractive.

This anime doesn't really excel at anything and is basically just another mediocre comedy-heavy SoL show. It's watchable but I'm mystified by the praise it so commonly receives.

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I watched Sakamichi no Apollon, also known as Kids on the Slope. Here are my thoughts:

A music-themed josei drama is right up my alley, so I expected that I would enjoy this. Unfortunately, despite my optimism, I was disappointed by this anime.

The anime has pretty good direction. It feels movie-like, both in terms of direction and production quality. Very polished.

Decent character designs for the male characters (can't say the same for the women). Although the art style is bland, the animation is fluid and looks nice. The colour palette is quite dull and muted, but admittedly it does suit the retro-Japan time period.

I really like YUKI's vocals, so it's not surprising that I enjoyed the OP song. The ED song grew on me over time as well. The OST itself was unremarkable from my perspective, but jazz fans may feel differently. Voice acting was alright; I thought the VAs for Sentarou and Yurika did a good job.

The characters each have unique personalities but one thing they all have in common is how immature they behave. This immaturity is frustrating, not endearing. Particularly so, given that this is a serious drama show. The main character is about as likable as Holden Caulfield (read: insufferable). In fact, I did not empathize with any of the characters in any way, despite the drama-heavy nature of the story.

Although the story takes place in the 1960s, this has fairly little relevance to the content of the show itself, aside from the prominence of jazz as a popular music genre. Give everyone a cell phone and it would easily pass as a high-school anime set in the modern day. It all felt very generic, regardless of the high production value. Basically just a jazz spin on a typical high-school drama anime. This generic feeling is compounded by the stereotypical mechanisms through which drama is created in the story.

I really dislike 'love at first sight' in fiction. It feels so shallow, forced and lazy on the writer's part. "These two characters just saw each other and never even spoke and now they're arbitrarily in 'love' with one another" ugh. This anime is guilty of doing this multiple times. Groan. Generally speaking, I also dislike love triangles (or n-dimensional polygons, in this case). That kind of w

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I watched Norn9: Norn+Nonet, which is an anime adaptation of an otome game. Here are my thoughts:

Cheap animation. Visually, the anime appears low budget and sloppy. Sometimes the background setting looks good, but the character animations themselves are consistently poor. Art style and colour palette are also fairly bland. Character designs are okay. There are occasionally some scenes where the visuals are nice, but the anime is very inconsistent, and on average weak, in this regard.

Fantastic soundtrack. Truly exceptional. I actually started listening to the OST long before I watched the anime itself. I even put it on my portable music device. It has some amazing tracks. The OST is by Kevin Penkin, who more recently made the wonderful Made in Abyss soundtrack. Voice acting is okay - the three lead female characters all do a good job.

Interesting sort-of-steampunk sci-fi setting with sky ships and things of that nature. Very little is explained but it's still lightyears better than your typical school environment.

The main character, for lack of a better phrase, is a complete autist. She is very awkward, shy, naive, and has zero social skills. Some people might find this tiresome but I thought it was kind of endearing. I'm so used to seeing males as the socially unskilled character that it's refreshing to have a female lead character fill that role. Actually there was a general trend within the entire cast of the female characters being introverted or strange in some way, whereas the male characters were comparatively more normal. Otome media typically focus on one main female character, but in Norn9 there were multiple female characters each of whom had their own character arc; I quite liked this aspect of the show, although I think a longer runtime was needed to comfortably accommodate each character arc.

Both the plot as a whole and the scene-by-scene drama felt ham-fisted to me. This is a common quality among VN adaptations. It's not necessarily a bad thing; it can be enjoyable as long as you expect it. That said, from early in the series it felt like a ton of plot strings and individual character arcs were introduced at once, and this made the viewing experience somewhat perplexing, particularly during the earlier episodes. Similarly, although character development

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Bit weird to show a bunch of kids right before a scene about how Shimamura is the youngest person there.

>>35112
After finally getting around to ep5 I see what you mean. The feelings here 'seem' painfully one sided, but I do wonder if like you said it's not a trust issue. Maybe she cares more for adachi than she herself knows but doesn't want to put herself out there and expose herself to all the issues that come with relationships. If the feelings aren't there deep down, with enough time they might form, who knows. Maybe she's comfortable with the status quo, but it can't go on like that and I think she knows it. I like to think she'll eventually drop her guard and let Adachi in, but I can't help but feel things might get a little ugly before that happens.

What a lewd girl Adachi is, undressing her friend in her mind like that.

>>35170
From ep2 on she really did turn into a huge pervert.

>>35164
I like how she got shit faced and graped the whole town right back.

Somehow there ended up being a huge tonal shift from the character presented in the first episode to the narcissistic witch that appears from then onwards. And other than jerking off about how beautiful she is, the only other expression she seems capable of showing is detached apathy.

I'm more interested in Saya's brief appearances and arcs at this point.

>>35167
Indeed. She's not the most likable protagonist.

>>35167
I saw that coming from the first episode but I was hoping I would be wrong for once. I guess even if she's the usual smug witch at least she isn't the lewd type too.

Just checked it out: not bad at all! Snappy, well-paced, and a nice selection of music. Never thought I'd see "cute girls use a DAW" checked off the list.

I watched the first episode today. I liked it. main girl is really expressive, the animation is really good, it has a unique idea, so it's a lot of fun. I think I'll keep watching the rest.

I can't help but mishear "wow war tonight" as "world war tonight."

Post edited on 21st Nov 2020, 10:12pm

>>35088
I'm not sure if it's ever directly explained (maybe someone else can chime in). It could just be that her family isn't well-off (unlike e.g. Chino's since I assume owning a cafe at least puts you somewhere above average). It could also be that she isn't/wasn't necessarily poor on the level of destitution, but previously needed to be frugal which is a habit that's stuck with her.

I'm gonna vote for sex museum!

What a lovely voice. I can listen to a girl like this talk all day.

The classmates are all great.

>>35086
I feel like this takes place in some alternate reality or something where comiket isn't a thing. considering the edits to the big sight, That statue is probably gone.

~The hills are a love live~ ~with the sound of j-pop~

I don't know much about Love Live beyond the first season but every time I see a picture of Rina without her face board it's like I'm looking at a character with a completely different personality. I found a video from the mobile game where she takes off her mask so is this a continuation of that or was her gimmick just done away with completely?

>>35155
It's not a continuation, although at many times this anime does feel like it. The "different personality" is actually why she wears the board. I think most people rightly assume she's shy, but she actually wears the board because she's a Kuudere who can't express emotions, The board does the job for her. Like an emotionless robot using emojis when chatting online, but in real life.

I'm disappointed they didn't keep the character's face hidden and use some creative perspectives and shots until it's her time to shine. That might have been fun, but they're starting from 0 with the character and want to establish why she uses it before bringing it out. I'm sure the creators probably debated a lot about what direction to go in with the character, and from a story telling perspective it makes more sense this way.

Old stuff is fine but when backlog is gone, you want new stuff.

Hanayamata is stunning so far.
I had originally avoided this one because the description didn't seem that interesting (it seemed it would be a love-live-esque idol-ish show) and I had also been previously burned by SoLs (read: kiniro mosaic) with foreign tenkousei MCs that ended up having 0 characterization beyond use in comedic gags.

I couldn't have been more wrong though. The animation and artwork is beautiful & fluid, the characters are well fleshed out, and the interactions and friendships feel genuine.

Post edited on 13th Aug 2020, 11:00pm

Episode 17 of xxxholic may be one of the worst episodes out of anything I've ever seen.

>>21926
I just started on Shirokuma Cafe as well. Some episodes are nice and heartwarming, some have well executed jokes, and some are just flat and boring. I suppose it's worth having something light to come back to – it's definitely a show that's meant to be chipped at away over a longer timespan though.

The "puns" (with pun in quotation mark since it doesn't even deserve to be called that) are annoying though. It's not a translation issue since I can understand most of the Japanese in the show fine (it does seem to be aired at kids, since there's lots of furigana in the show). Somehow in a language chock full of homophones they always manage to pick boring word tuples that are not even slightly ambiguous, e.g. "okawari, himawari, suikawari." And the "puns" don't have any setup or payoff: they're just thrown out there seemingly whenever the polar bear feels like it.

They're gunning for nyaa now:
https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down-pirate-anime-giant-nyaa-si-201104/

>>35075
Two more will take it's place.

>>35075
Looks like they failed, for now, since this happened in September. If this were to happen, however, then pantsu or similar will probably be used at least on a provisional basis. I think they've been mirroring nyaa.si's database.
It's amusing TorrentFreak references HorribleSubs' ceasing their operation as if it were important.

>>35075
Oh noes!

Or suffer my curse...!

>>35132
I could see that being the case if they didn't somehow get lost and find themselves at home.

A matrix parody, in this day and age?!

I wonder which princess sleeps more, her or Kaguya.

>>35102
I'm guessing the creators probably know that's an easy way to at least get the character spread around on the net.

>>35107
Yeah, it's the anime equivalent of a youtube thumbnail

'"Uchuu Senkan Yamato" to Iu Jidai: Seireki 2202-nen no Sentaku' compilation film new visual and main trailer.
https://yamato2202.net/omnibus2202/index.html

>>35147
Finally. I've been waiting on news for this.

>>34302
They do such amazing designs for characters that will only appear for a few seconds, it's like they have a magic machine that creates great anime girls for free.

>>22465
Should have ended at Der Film.

>>34838
That certainly would have been a good send off, but I think it's a fun series that still has plenty of potential, even if the latest installments were poorly handled.

https://twitter.com/kekocha/status/1322356291084251141