Final Thoughts – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

One of my favorites of the season, stopped just short of really being great.

Bunny Girl Senpai takes a very literal look at how it feels to be a teenager, as teenage problems begin to manifest themselves in the real world and break the laws of the universe.

I’m very, very impressed by the execution of this concept, because it falls into almost none of the traps I’d expect from a show that only really has one male character surrounded by lots of girls – not only is Sakuta’s relationship with his girlfriend established early enough to effectively kill a harem, but the rest of the female cast have absolutely no romantic feelings towards him, and they’re already connected to him or his friends somehow. The writing in this show is honestly masterful – every single important concept is set up at least a full episode before it becomes plot-critical, the characters remain consistent and there are no stupid romcom lewd misunderstandings. Everyone leans towards acting like sane, rational people and it makes it a million times easier to get invested in the drama, because all of it comes from a place of realness – it reminds me a lot of Tsukigakirei with a little more fantasy thrown in.

Oh, and of course there are the unavoidable comparisons to Oregairu and Bakemonogatari.

I’ve already praised it a lot in my previous write-ups, but I want to temper expectations, because there’s one thing Tsukigakirei had over Bunny Girl Senpai, and that’s a satisfying ending. While Bunny Girl’s isn’t bad enough to taint the entire experience and I didn’t foresee it the way I did After the Rain’s, it does come very abruptly after an emotional climax and cut the end of the last arc very short. It was a bit of a sour note on top of what otherwise would have easily been a Hall of Fame show, but as it is, I still enjoyed Bunny Girl Senpai enough to happily award it an 8/10.

Final Thoughts – Bloom Into You

Let’s face it; the problem lies with the source material.

I mentioned in my updated impressions post that my only real issue with Bloom Into You is that it doesn’t concern itself with Yuu’s consent; not only is Touko still pursuing her aggressively despite Yuu firmly giving her a no, but the show itself wants me to think that this is acceptable simply because Touko is damaged and with the understanding that the two of them will inevitably end up together anyway. I thought we’d gotten mostly past this, but as of episode 9 – three-quarters of the way into the series – Touko is still cornering Yuu and demanding a kiss, not listening to her protests.

I object to this on principle.

I don’t care how the story ends at this point; I can’t root for Touko at all anymore. Despite still being a well-animated production (though the bright aesthetic still hurts to look at, honestly) the story has completely lost me.

Dropped after 8.5 episodes. 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san

So good it makes me cry a little.

I often say that the work comedy genre works better in condensed form like this, and Honda-san proves me right more than any other example thus far. It doesn’t give much room for jokes to go on for too long, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

And what comes out on the other end is a perfectly distilled comedy with little extra fat and a lot of great jokes. While American bookstores certainly don’t operate in quite the same way (having each bookseller be in charge of a specific section is a pipe dream in the U.S. and is both encouraged by the company and discouraged by management), a lot of the humor is handled the same way, and it’s always nice to see a work-com focus on retail (most of them are restaurant-focused), as I feel like it conveys a pretty good sense of what it’s like to be behind the counter.

But the jokes being good isn’t that surprising – in a season that saw the long-awaited return of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Honda-san managed to be the biggest meme generator of the fall – I’d actually like to focus on the strengths of the production. Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san takes strong advantage of its minimalist art style by exaggerating visual emotions on the characters’ expressionless faces, but even without that, the voice work is strong enough that you can almost see the expressions anyway. The faces don’t change much, but based on the way Honda speaks, you could swear that skull is smiling, or exhausted, or scared. It’s incredibly impressive in a show created on such a small budget and demonstrates how much passion was put into it.

So…aside from one or two gags I didn’t find particularly entertaining, I have no complaints and no problems heavily recommending this one, particularly if you do enjoy books or work in a retail space.

9/10!

Updated Impressions – SSSS. Gridman

TRIGGER returns to glory with their personal take on one of the oldest genres in Japanese television.

So, speaking as an adult, I loved Power Rangers when I was a kid (I started watching right around Ninja Storm) but, trying to go back in now, I can’t stand how cheesy it all comes across as. It’s something that I just can’t put nostalgia goggles on for and can’t sit through comfortably because it just feels so immature. While Power Rangers certainly started in Japan (and I’ve not been able to really give Super Sentai shows their own shot due to them being largely unavailable here), the fights against giant monsters at the end of every episode were more or less their own separate genre, with their most recognizable entry being the Godzilla franchise.

Of course, there was also Ultraman, which even briefly tried to be A Thing when Saban got a hold of it and started airing it in the U.S., but having tried that, the entire thing seemed really silly to me. What I wanted was something much less episodic and more tight. These shows go on for over fifty episodes just to keep perpetually airing, and though they do tell a story, most of them could be effectively told in half (or even less) of that time. (I recognize that I have totally enjoyed shows like that – Brave Beats, for example – but usually they have a pretty distinct personality to get me really hooked.)

Thank God for TRIGGER, coming along and doing exactly that, telling a tightly-plotted story about fighting giant monsters in only twelve episodes, while giving it just the slightest bit of maturity to make it way more palatable for adults. Every genre staple is accounted for – lots of different monsters that do different things, lots of toyetic attachments to the main robot hero, and a reset button that undoes all the destruction after every attack so this doesn’t turn into a disaster story – but it’s all presented in a way that won’t make adult viewers think of it as lazy writing.

Speaking of lazy writing, though, something that happened late in the sixth episode is tripping me up here, though, and it hurts me to mention it because the creative direction of the sequence in question was genius. In the sixth episode, there exists a really terrible infodump that frankly drew comparisons in my head to Another, one of the most poorly-written shows I’ve ever seen, and it really harshed my buzz, so I have to give out yet another 7/10 thus far.

Updated Impressions – Goblin Slayer

Definitely held up the way I was hoping for.

The tone of this show has gone back and forth between the Dark Souls vibe it was giving me for the first few episodes, and a dark take on something like DanMachi, but thus far I’m pretty hopeful for this series sticking the landing, and I’ll tell you what I’m basing that on.

Thus far, the characters have been explicitly stopped from framing Goblin Slayer himself as some kind of hero, and pretty much everyone that actually goes adventuring with him will understand by the end that he’s goddamn crazy. He doesn’t fight goblins because he’s altruistic, he does it because he’s a vengeful psychopath trying to rack up a body count. Luckily for society, his attitude pretty much only extends to goblins, but what I’m really looking for out of Goblin Slayer (which will get it an 8- or 9/10 if the rest of the show can hold up, for the record) is to get a proper follow-through on that idea. I want to see the man really acknowledged as the crazy murderer he is. If that doesn’t happen, it will sour my opinion on this one considerably.

You may have noticed that I won’t be giving this one a perfect score even if it does everything I want it to, and that’s simple – the director still tries way, way too hard to push the TNA every chance that he gets. While I get that some elements of this are from the source material, actually seeing them played out is just distracting, and we absolutely did not need any graphic rape or implied rape, particularly when the women’s (and it is always women, because every monster sees them as a sex object first) savaged body is framed for titillation. This is an element that gets on my nerves in any show at all, because I don’t understand the reason you’d want to put it into a broadcast show. Speaking pragmatically, there is already plenty of actually-explicit hentai out there to pander to rape fetishists, so I don’t really get why they would come to something that can’t show anything happening.

That’s currently dragging on me a lot, so for the moment, it’s getting a 7/10.

Updated Impressions – Bloom Into You

Being perfectly honest, I almost dropped this one.

I gave it the traditional three-episode-try (even though I don’t really subscribe to that way of thinking, hence why I drop most things after one or even half of one episode) and at the end of the third episode, Bloom Into You had completely lost its hook in me by making Nanami utterly insufferable with her constant pestering of Yuu about her unrequited love for her, not developing any of its side characters, and not making any real plot progress. I am happy to report that the following three episodes made a pretty decent recovery, but I want to stress that episodes two and three are very boring and off-putting.

Still with me? Good.

The second quarter of the show manages a rerailment by recontextualizing Yuu’s refusal to reciprocate Nanami’s feelings as explicitly being her uncertainty over whether she can feel that way about anyone, and does a great deal to flesh out other members of the student council into at least two-dimensional people. We’ve at least reached the level of “good”, but there are still issues I’m having here with the way this show is produced.

Normally, TROYCA make excellently-animated shows, and Bloom Into You isn’t an exception to that, but the aesthetic of this show is, while somewhat stylized, very boring. The average color trends somewhere around beige-orange, and it doesn’t work because the show doesn’t lean into this filter the way that, say, No Game No Life does. It just perpetually looks like the sun is setting in the background of every scene.

Bloom Into You still has a bit of a hill to climb in my head before I would strongly recommend it, but it is at least still doing better than NTR or Citrus, so there’s hope yet.

Score so far: 6/10

Updated Impressions – Release the Spyce

It’s not quite Princess Principal, but it’s definitely trying.

And that’s not a negative at all – we may be waiting a bit for the movies to be released stateside, so I’ll happily take a very good knock-off at the moment to tide me over.

Maybe I should stop directly comparing them, but honestly the parallels are strong here, even if they end with the fine details. While I can still say I like the PP gang and setting better, Release the Spyce is not running far behind it in terms of decent action and a compelling cast. It’s skewing closer to being a cute-girls show, but it’s not doing a bad job of it. Really what it was lacking up until the most recent episodes was a real sense of conflict – while we’ve known from the beginning that there is a traitor among our group of friends, in practice up until now the show has mostly been focused on a light Villain of the Week setup, with none except Byakko really making any sort of impression. Now it looks like we’ve gotten past that stage, things can really start swinging.

The element where it really pales in comparison though is in the production. Spyce is far from a bad-looking show, but it is a little bit too generic for my taste – in fact, some of the design elements are actively working against it. For example, while the girls go by codenames while in spy-mode, they don’t do anything to hide their appearance, making it really implausible that the villains aren’t able to identify the girls with the most distinctive hairstyles in town. While they don’t have to necessarily be toned down and boring, it would have made a little more sense if they’d justified it somehow like what Persona 5 does (having the cast at least wear masks) or even what Immortal Hounds does (having the main character wear a light-reflective ribbon so her face can’t be clearly seen by cameras).

I also would have really appreciated a more effective villain – while they claim to be continually successful, the girls do keep fairly easily thwarting plans even while they’re being played by the traitor – and some justification for why these villains have to operate in Sorasaki to begin with, considering the hypercompetent vigilante squad roaming the streets at night.

Still, it’s been a lot of fun to watch so far, so I’m going to at least bump it up beyond just being enjoyable.

Score so far: 7/10

Updated Impressions – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

This didn’t really go where I was expecting, and maybe that was foolish of me, but I’m not complaining.

Six episodes in, IRODUKU has actualized into a gorgeously rendered romance with light fantasy elements, and some strong directorial decisions have made me wonder why more people aren’t talking about it. It’s not unpopular, it’s actually in the top ten of MAL’s Fall chart (sitting right above Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, in fact), but Amazon is also utterly awful at marketing their anime so maybe it’s more complicated than that.

In any case, the production from P.A. Works has definitely held up, with a sequence in the sixth episode being one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen this year and the background work and attention to detail being consistent highlights. The characters are definitely being played for realism, and that works well played against the magical elements of the show’s universe. The two lead characters are certainly strong as well, both being shy teenagers who have different problems and anxieties, and Hitomi’s status as reluctant time traveller combined with her personality make her an understated deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl type you would expect her to be if you saw her leading man.

My one real problem here is actually that not much has really happened, which is fine when the character work being done is effective, but after Just Because! last year, I’m wary of any romance that is going to take until the last episode to materialize. Still, there’s reason for some optimism here as the sixth episode ends on a major story beat that looks like it might get things moving, so I’m going to keep watching and remain positive.

Score so far: 8/10

Updated Impressions – Boarding School Juliet

This is still impressing me more than I thought it would.

Boarding School Juliet isn’t some great revelation or anything – honestly, the first episode was still the best – but the dramatic elements it has set up thus far have at least made it intriguing, adding an action element to your standard romcom. I also like any version of Romeo who isn’t a whiny idiot.

And in six episodes, we’ve actually made a surprising and encouraging amount of progress – not only are the main couple still together, but their romantic rivals have mostly been informed already that they don’t actually have a chance, not to mention that the hypotenuse in Juliet’s love triangle is also a girl who explicitly has a crush on her. The handling of Hasuki has been a highlight, and she is easily my favorite character, being that she feels like a better-written version of Sword Art Online’s Suguha (a close lone friend to the main character who has long harbored feelings for him but will ultimately be turned down), because her personality is very well-established and she proves to be very good at calling Romio out on his bullshit and for lying to his friends.

My only real issue that I’ve encountered thus far is the fact that the trio that tried to rape the heroine in the premiere are being portrayed as just general asshole bullies. This is a touchy subject that wasn’t really given the gravity that it needed in the first place, and I really want to see some kind of acknowledgement in-universe that what they did was fucked up, but it seems unlikely.

Still, this is going pretty well so far and the production work by LIDENFILMS is keeping a pretty decent pace from the first episode, so I’m willing to give it some wiggle room.

Score so far: 7/10

Updated Impressions – Zombieland Saga

All RIGHT! Zombie IDOLS! Let’s GOOOOO!

This show Has No Chill and I am here for it. Zombieland Saga joins Revue Starlight as the most out-there ideas the idol genre has to offer, and thus far it’s doing pretty damn well for itself in terms of pure comedic genius. The timing in this show has made me laugh like a hyena more than once and it is brilliant.

Zombieland Saga also has the most diverse group of girls I’ve seen, though it helps that many of them have extreme personalities that would be overwhelming in a more grounded show. It’s almost like plucking a random set of Danganronpa girls out and throwing them into a unit, and it works shockingly well. Hell, by the second episode we’ve defused a lot of the tension involved in one of the most genius representations of catharsis I’ve seen in any anime, period. I won’t spoil it if you’ve not seen it but rest assured it’s probably going to be on a year-end list or something.

The one thing that bothers me, however, is that the performance we’ve seen (multiple times, with the same song) is rendered in low-framerate CGI and it just looks awful compared to the animation of the rest of the show. I can accept the choreography here because the entire point is that the girls don’t really know what they’re doing and their manager is completely unhelpful, so the amateurish stuff comes off cute, but not when it looks this bad. MAPPA can do better, especially since the song gets repeated multiple times over. Maybe they’ll fix it for the blu ray, but I’ll probably never know.

In spite of that, Zombieland Saga is definitely very high on my list for this season and I eagerly await the second half.

Score so far: 9/10