Summer Anime 2012

I’ll leave the long and detailed descriptions to other people. Here’s my take.

Yes

Chitose Get You — Looks ok. Spazzy story about an 11-year-old girl and her hopeless crush on a teenage guy. One of those 10-minute shows.

Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — Strange admixture of fairies, post-disaster/end of civilization, and cynical shots at the U.N. AWESOME.

Natsuyuki Rendezvous — An interesting, pensive, bittersweet romance involving the owner of a flower shop, her deceased, ghostly husband, and the part-time employee-dreamer.

Tari Tari — Pretty funny. Lighthearted h.s. romance/coming-of-age/slice-of-life. Earnest, heart-felt.

Maybe

Joshiraku — Preview was too short. Looks like a plotless slice-of-life show.

Oda Nobuna no Yabou — Dunno. Looks like it’s a historical-based, but also comedic and fundamentally unserious. Probably will perv out.

No

Campione — Profane over-the-top dialog plus Godzilla-like monsters and superficial nods to archeology.

Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate — pervy foody H.S. that attempts to make its porn delivery acceptable by making things ultra feminine.

Kono Naka ni Hitori, Imouto ga Iru — more pervy school stuff. Yawn.

Kokuro Connect — Body-hopping & boob-grabbing. Yawn. Too bad it’s not as funny and strange as the classic Kokoro Scan ad.

La Storia Della Arcana Famiglia — First, it’s by J.C. Staff, which almost always spells lame, at least in English. Second and third, this is another stupid shonen show — and I mean every word. It is stupid, in that things are done for no reason; it is shonen in that it’s all about having battles for the sake of battles. That it’s by J.C. Staff means that there are good ideas made hopelessly sixth-grade.

Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse — Mecha + risque shots + overserious soundtrack.

Sword Art Online — Boring shonen hack-n-slash.

Utakoi – The Hundred Poets told through the eyes of a lecherous womanizer. It tries to be funny, but it’s an eroge.

Plus, there are a boatload of second seasons for shows that weren’t even worth a season one:

• Dog Days
• Kyokai Senjou no Horizon
• Moyashimon
• Rinne no Lagrange
• Yuri Yuri

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Natsuro Kiseki (A Summer-colored Miracle) Guide

This show has all the ingredients to be something remembered for generations, but it doesn’t know what to do with them. It doesn’t resort to perv material to make up for it, and so it doesn’t fail spectacularly either. It just bubbles along, slowly, like someone dancing in place. The music is almost better than the series, in a way; the music is memorable — both themes — and even the music used in the show itself, while the show just doesn’t have the character development, and the growth that makes a series worthwhile. With that said, the best episode of the series is the last. It has character development, timelessness, and the painful, yet necessary maturation of growing up. The next-best episode is the first. The rest range from good to somewhat questionable (some risque insinuations show up from time to time), but the whole innocent sheen remains intact.

Rin, Natsume, Yuka, and Saki

Natsuro Kiseki tells the story of four jr. high girls — Rin, Yuka, Natsume, and Saki — in their last summer together, as Saki is moving to a new school on a remote island. They have many memorable experiences along the way, beginning with flying about 100 feet in the air in the first episode. This is a wish granted to them by the rock-sama at Rin’s shrine. (Yeah, rock-sama. Whatever.)

The tone has sensitivity and honesty high on the charts. The dialog is realistic, too, and the characters are sharply defined. At the best, it’s simply delicious, wistful, and yet, sadly inexorable. At worst, it’s just there, like images moving on a screen.

This wasn’t a bad series, but I wasn’t emotionally moved enough by it to bother listing out short descriptions of each episode. They were all stand-alone episodes anyways except for 1,11, and 12 — and that’s sad. Natsuro Kiseki, like a lot of people, and a lot of days in our lives, self-immolates in unused potential.

Fansubbed by Rori and by Tasty-Anmitsu.

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Summer ’09 Series Progress Report

We’re halfway through summer, so let’s see how the summer anime` season is turning out.

Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana) — Dropped. Yup, it’s shoujo-ai.
GA Art Design Con — Dropped. Boring and no characterization.
Kanamemo — Dropped. It’s loli. Sick stuff.
Sora no Manimani — Eeh. I’m barely holding on. It’s pretty shallow and spazzy, which is a shame. The characters could lead to some deep and interesting stories.
Taisho Baseball Girls — Fantastic. This is everything that K-On! could have been.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 — Spellbinding. If you watch only one series this summer, watch this one!

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Upcoming Anime` Summer 2009

Now this is a spectacular use of torrents. Someone put together all the previews of the summer 2009 anime shows in one torrent file. Go check it out here.

Here is the OO breakdown.

Yes

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GA Art Design Con — Looks cute and funny
Kanamemo — Looks cute and funny, a la K-On!

Maybe

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Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana) — Not sure if this is going to be shoujo-ai or not, but I hope not.
Sora no Manimani — HS astronomy anime`. Better than Toradora? One can only hope.
Taisho Baseball Girls — Same deal as Blue Flowers.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 — Hard to tell what’s going on here, but it could be really emotional.

No

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Bakemonogatari
Canaan
Judden-Chan — The torrent thankfully put this in a separate ecchi (i.e. hentai) folder, so you know what you’re in for.
Needless — The title says it all, actually.
Princess Lover — Yup, it’s panty-shot time.
Sea Story — A shame really, because the atmosphere had a lot of promise. Instead we get mermaids on land wearing next to nothing, bending over. Whatever.
Spicey Wolf — More of the same Spice & Wolf moral relativism, I’m sure.
Umineko
Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou (Modern Magic)

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