Winter 2020 Preview II.

Second and also last part of this season’s preview.

Natsunagu!

There’s not much information about this one, but the promo image had many people hyped. Until they found out:

• the episodes might be just 3 minutes long
• it’s a “propaganda anime funded by Kumamoto local government”

I, myself, don’t mind either, but we’ll see.

Natsuna Kunugi, a university student in Tokyo, visits Kumamoto in search of friends who she could not contact following the Kumamoto earthquakes. There, she meets local people who are full of compassion and uniqueness, including the energetic junior high school student, Izumi. A heartfelt coming-of-age story begins.

—MAL

Airs on Tuesday January 7th 

Nekopara

Nekopara, short for Neko Paradise, is originally an eroge. Years ago it got an OVA and now it’s getting a whole anime series. I haven’t played the eroge, but the OVA was okay. The animation seems a little better this time around, but I’m more worried about the content. It’s a slice-of-life about catgirls working at a café, so I’m afraid there will be more fanservice than story. But there’s cats, so there’s that.

Airs on Thursday January 9th

Somali to Mori no Kamisama

I’ve heard great things about the source manga and the promo video looks awesome, so I really hope this series doesn’t disappoint.

The gist is “A golem looks for someone to look after a human child after he expires in a world where humanity is essentially dead and hated.”, I think. I haven’t read the manga and the summaries don’t give away much.

Except for the golem and the human child, there seems to be a number of other creatures in the series and they all look so interesting. The backgrounds are breathtaking, reminiscent of Made in Abyss for example.

Airs on Friday January 10th 

Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga

This is my husband’s pick, I’m not expecting much. Various warlords from the Warring States (Sengoku) era are reborn as dogs with their personalities, memories and grudges intact. Hopefully the seiyuu will do a good job.

Airs on Saturday January 11th

That’s it! Time to watch these and possibly report back.

Winter 2020 Preview I.

You know how people say the winter anime season is always mediocre with just a couple of interesting series? It turns out that this year I’m interested in enough anime series (specifically nine) to fill two season preview posts.

Koisuru Asteroid

The main heroine Mira wants to join an astronomy club in high school because of a childhood promise—as a little girl, she met a boy named Ao at a campsite and while there is a star sharing Mira’s name, there was no star called Ao. So she promised to one day find Ao’s star.

She joins the Geosciences Club (that’s the Astronomy Club merged with Geology Club) to meet Ao Manaka. Her Ao is a girl! From there on I expect it to be a stereotypical cute-girls-doing-cute-things anime.

The premise is kind of dumb, but maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn something about stars. Also the animation looks pretty good. Although this series is an adaptation of a manga, I haven’t read it, so that’s all I have to say for now.

Airs: Friday January 3rd

Yatogame-chan Kansatsu Nikki 2nd Season

We have seen and liked the first season, so this one was an obvious choice.

It’s a series of 3-minute shorts about Yatogame-chan, a cute Aichi schoolgirl who talks in Nagoya dialect. It’s simple, but interesting and entertaining.

Airs: Sunday January 5th

Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica Gaiden (TV)

Do you remember Madoka? The anime series aired in 2011 and it was amazing. In 2012-3 a series of three movies came out, riding the wave. Really, Madoka was huge.

This season we’re getting a side story, so if you haven’t seen the original series and movies, you should still be able to enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you’ve been playing Magia Record, then this is a must-see. (And you probably know more about it than I do.)

The blurb: Young girls can get one wish granted by a cute white creature with telling blood-colored eyes in exchange for becoming magical girls and protecting our world from witches. The series will once again follow a group of magical girls, unraveling a tale of friendship et cetera.

Regarding the animation and art style, the team is similar and so the series will look about the same as the original Madoka. Which means it’s a normal SHAFT anime. If you know their experimental style, you won’t be surprised, but otherwise get ready for a treat.

Airs: Sunday January 5th

Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!

Another manga adaptation and I’ve actually read a little of this one. The main heroine wants to make an anime, her rich classmate wants to escape her parents’ idea of their daughter’s future and live for herself and the third girl is, as far as I can tell, the manager, who will plot and prod and make it happen.

The style of the manga is something else—sketchy with angular character designs. What’s amazing is that the anime seems to be retaining it. Though it is a bit more polished. (And in color of course.)

I’m really looking forward to this one, because it’s about creation, fiction and reality. Right up my alley. (I’ve also been told the team behind the anime is a stellar one, so my expectations are definitely high.)

Airs: Monday January 6th

Heya Camp△

We’ve watched and loved Yuru Camp, so this one was a given. Unfortunately, there isn’t much information out yet. No episode count, no duration,… just “short anime” airing in 5 days.

Most people expect it to be a series of shorts, but really no one knows.

Airs: Monday January 6th

That’s it for now! Part II. is coming. (Probably on Sunday.)

XXXX House

Masahiro Harada and Mao Harada.

Two architects, Masahiro Harada and Mao Harada, who make up Mount Fuji Architects Studio have been collecting awards since their student years. There is a long list of all their achievements on their website.

In 2003 they got a project in Yaizu near Shizuoka. The owner saved up to buy a Toyota Corolla Sedan and in the last minute decided he would rather have a pottery studio built. He asked the pair of architects to build him one with the budget he had for the car. He had 1.5 million Japanese yen in 2003. That’s about 14 400 US dollars in 2019. So, not much.

Which one would you choose—the workshop or the car?

Pottery workshop

Toyota Corolla Sedan

ブレンド・S | Blend S: 1-3

I know this anime, Blend S, aired two years ago, but I still haven’t finished it. I have a lot of notes, so bear with me. Let’s do this!

The main character, Maika, has a hard time finding a part-time job because of her condescending appearance. I know it sounds weird, but her eyes just have that particular look, that makes her seem disdainful when dealing with customers. And since the customer is our bread giver, that’s not exactly a valued trait at most establishments.

This is a problem until she arrives at Stile, a café half full of otaku, where the waitresses act out certain archetypal roles while serving the customers. There’s a tsundere (Kaho-san), an imouto (Mafuyu-san) and Maika-san earns the sadistic role for her eyes.

The whole anime is less about the inner workings of a café and more about the character mechanics. For that reason, let me quickly introduce the five who appear in the first episode.

The main character, Sakuranomiya Maika, is a sheltered youngest child of a wealthy, traditional Japanese family. She tends to speak in polite forms of verbs, making her down-putting edicts even more so. Unfortunately this singular characteristic can’t be translated into English very well.

Fall 2019 Preview

The fall season has started. There are several series I’d like to at least try watching. Overall though, there isn’t much interesting this season. Maybe I’ll watch some older anime as well. My backlog has only grown…

Houkago Saikoro Club

First up is this manga adaptation about board games. I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, but my husband is curious, so we’ll try watching it together. I have read the first chapter of the manga and all I can say is that it’s slow and character-driven. Which is normal with slice-of-life anime.

Summary:

A story about girls playing board games after school!
Kyoto in Spring. Aya is a high school girl who’s just moved to a new town. Miki is her shy classmate, and her first friend. One day after school Aya and Miki follow the committee president Midori to a specialty board games store. The Dice Club!! Without thinking they try out a German board game together.
These girls, who are searching for fun, soon fall into the exciting world of games!

—MAL

The first chapter of the manga introduces Miki and her world view, shows her first meeting with Aya and their first adventure together. In 30 pages. That’s why I wrote that it’s slow above.

The promo video is actually much livelier. What’s interesting are the games, which seem to be real games, as in games you can actually go and buy at a game store in the real world. So if you’re looking for some board game recommendations, this might be a good anime for you. The first episode airs tomorrow.

Chuubyou Gekihatsu Boy

Next up, airing on Friday, is this comedy about five boys, who have some highly improbable ideas about themselves. There’s a superhero, an otaku, an angel/devil reincarnate, a tone-deaf singer and a string-puller. Once again this is my husband’s pick and I expect myself to drop this after the first episode.

Recommended for people who liked Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!

Africa no Salaryman

Yet another comedy, but this one is actually my pick. It’s originally a web manga and had already gotten an anime adaptation in 2017. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get my hands on either of those. The first adaptation was a series of 10 web shorts, but this time it should be full episodes, so ~25 minutes.

It’s about three office rats, except they’re not rats, but a lion, a toucan and a lizard. They deal with the usual problems in capitalism and also the everyday issues one encounters after emigrating from the savanna to a Japanese office.

As you can see from the PV, the animation is simple, but cute with a bit of experimentation here and there. This airs on the 7th.

Fragtime

Fragtime is actually not a series. It’s a movie slated for November 22nd. Which means we probably won’t be able to see it outside of Japan until spring of 2020 or until the BDs come out or something. But it’s airing this season, so I’m including it here anyway.

What would you do if you could stop time? Moritani for one is using her unusual ability to stop time for three minutes a day to observe the people around her. One day, she chooses to “observe” class idol Murakami’s panties—only to find herself in a very compromising situation when her classmate turns out to be immune to her power.

—Yuri Project

It’s also originally a manga, so I think I’ll read that today.

That’s it! From the hundred works airing this season, I’m interested in these four.

Social Media Detox vol. 2

In January I went through a social media detox and wrote about it on Medium. I would have done that this time around as well, had they not changed their monetisation, because this topic isn’t exactly an otaku one. Oh well, if you’re not interested, just skip this one.

January was crazy. It was such a busy and atypical month that I had little time to miss social media. But the subsequent months were different. Suddenly, I found myself with free time and nothing to fill it with. Social media slowly crept back into my life and made themselves very, very comfortable. Once again realizing I wasn’t working on the important projects and instead whittling away hours every day checking for new posts, I turned BlockSite back on.

BlockSite is a Chrome extension, which blocks the five most distracting sites for me. Of course, it has more features than that, but I use just this main function. This time around I’m blocking facebook, tumblr, twitter, one discussion website (think reddit) and pinterest, even though I rarely use it. On top of BlockSite, I uninstalled twitter and tumblr apps from my phone.

Looking Back: 2018

Like last year I would like to take a couple of minutes to look back on the past twelve months.

This time around my activity greatly depended on my school and work commitments. Specifically with the start of the summer and later winter semester, I stopped blogging altogether. Nevertheless I had managed to revive the blog for 40 posts this year, including this one. Lesser in number, but markedly longer on average than last year. Actually, this year I wrote almost 24k words, surpassing last year by roughly 5k and making this year my most productive (when it comes to words written) yet. That’s the statistics, now for some reflection, once again courtesy of Lauren Orsini of Otaku Journalist.

2019 will be the year of the pig.

What made up your body of work this year? Which parts are you most proud of?

I feel like there wasn’t much focus to my choice of topics this year. There were reviews of whole series, both of the whole thing at once and by three episodes. There were architectural posts in August. I scraped out some old drafts and peppered them throughout the year. It’s been hotchpotch of topics.

Even so, I am proud of my summer body of work. I worked diligently writing two posts per week for several months. I finally wrote the yonkoma post that I have been procrastinating on for ages. Then I went back to school, work and having no free time whatsoever.

Blogging-wise, I don’t have any goals for next year. School and work are my priorities and if I am too busy with the two, then I just am not going to blog. On the other hand, I have 60 drafts I would like to finish…

Happy New Year!

Fall 2018 Preview II.

This is the second (and last) installment of this season’s previews. Unknowingly I picked quite a number of shorts/shorter-than-full episodes this season. Maybe I will be able to follow some of these throughout the whole three months!

Sono Toki, Kanojo wa

A series of shorts about love.

The anime will take place in Fukuoka, and will follow the love lives of four female protagonists as high school students, college students, and as working adults.

—ANN

This could be pretty bad or pretty good. One of the problems some people have with the series already is that it looks like it will be purely heterosexual. On the other hand, so was Tsurezure Children and that was very well received. My expectations so far are high in the art style department, but I’m a little worried as to how the story/stories will be. Anyway, this is airing today!

Fall 2018 Preview I.

Although lately I haven’t had the time to write (blame real life), I still plan on watching some, namely six, anime this season. I’m sure I won’t be following all six for the whole 12+ weeks, but a girl can dream, right? Without further ado, let’s look at the first three today. There will be a second installment on Sunday.

Jingai-san no Yome

Jingai-san no Yome (lit. Outcast’s Spouse) is airing today!

Tomari Hinowa is a normal high schooler, until one day he’s told that he has to become the wife of a mysterious creature called Kanenogi. This is the start of their newly married life.

—MU

It’s adapted from a yonkoma, so the episodes are going to be only 5 minutes long. The genre is comedy, though we expect a bit of slice-of-life as well.

Since I have not been able to get my hands on the manga, I don’t know what else to expect. The PV doesn’t give much information either. One thing is certain though—the monster spouse, who loves drooling all over the boy, is cute.

Entry on Tokyo Otaku Mode

Kodama in Anime

Let’s dive into some figures of Japanese folklore and their representation in anime. Today I would like to focus on kodama, Japanese spirits that inhabit trees. Japanese dryads, if you will.

Up until a short time ago, the word kodama immediately made me think of the Ghibli rendering—glow-in-the-dark bobbleheads with wonky heads from Princess Mononoke.

Then I watched Hoozuki no Reitetsu and saw a totally different kodama.

Instead of tiny toy-like figures with asymmetrical faces, I was met with a child-sized spirit with an apron over a kimono and leaves sticking out everywhere. Now, they are both cute, but otherwise rather different. That made me think, what about other depictions of kodama in anime?