Winter 2018 Preview III.

This is the last installment of this season’s previews. This time I will write about two anime I forgot about when I planned this miniseries. They are Violet Evergarden and Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san.

ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン | Violet Evergarden

by Cheese慷

Violet Evergarden is about Violet Evergarden, a girl…

[…]formerly known as “the weapon,” has left the battlefield to start a new life at CH Postal Service. There, she is deeply moved by the work of “Auto Memories Dolls,” who carry people’s thoughts and convert them into words.

Violet begins her journey as an Auto Memories Doll, and comes face to face with various people’s emotions and differing shapes of love. All the while searching for the meaning of the words, she has heard on the battlefield, uttered by someone dear to her.

Backlog: Week 11

This week was awful as far as anime goes. I was very busy and when I had some free time, I’d study and not watch anime. I watched 21 episodes, including 12 shorts.

Natsume Yuujinchou Go

New seasons of Natsume Yuujinchou are always a safe bet. I was having a hard time watching stuff at the beginning of fall last year and was looking for something I could depend on to be soothing and well-done. Well, this is it. There are a good number of regular “youkai-of-the-day” episodes, but there’s also some development with the Matoba clan and Natori-san gets one episode. Overall, exactly what you’d expect.

Young Natori

By the way, the next season, Natsume Yuujinchou Roku, will start airing on Wednesday.

Backlog: Week 10

This was the last week of the winter season, so I have one anime from this season. In all I watched 21 episodes, including 13 shorts.

Tamako Love Story

Tamako Love Story is a full-length movie following the Tamako Market TV series. Mochizou is seriously considering studying film-making in Tokyo and has decided to confess to Tamako before going away. It’s a love story with one airhead heroine and one poor, sweet boy. I don’t want to give anything away, but he confesses! And her reaction! Aaaa! I cried.

Subjectively, I loved it. Objectively, the art is KyoAni. The plot is more than just a love story — we are confronted with all the main five characters’ visions of future and then there’s the baton club entering a contest. Plus there’s a little more development of lesser characters, like the shopping district men and women. I don’t think there are any bad points… maybe the yelling, but that might be more cultural? (When the characters are frustrated they run out into an open space, like a riverbank or a field, and just scream.) Let me know, what you think.

Backlog: Week 7

It’s Sunday! This week I finished two movies, one short and one series. As always I watched 21 episodes, including 13 shorts. I’m finishing a lot, but my “watching” and “to watch” numbers are barely budging.

Backlog: Week 4

I’ve been busy, but I still managed to watch 3 episodes every day. So I watched 21 eps total — including 10 shorts and one 80-minute movie.

I’m running out of things to say in these introductions. That was fast…

Backlog: Week 3

Am I boring with these “old” anime? This is nothing — I also have nine 90’s anime in my backlog. When I break out those, it will be a real trip into anime history for some of you. Look forward to that!

This week I watched 21 episodes, including 16 shorts. I’m trying to watch more full-fledged episodes, but when I’m really tired or just generally running out of time, I watch shorts to fulfill my daily episode goal. Like when I stop studying at 10PM and just want to go to sleep.

Backlog: Week 2

Welcome to the third post about my “backlog adventure”. I tried writing a bit more about the series and not just my incoherent reactions this time, so I hope you like the format better. This week I watched 21 episodes, including 11 shorts. (Random piece of trivia: In January I finished 15 anime series. That’s the most I ever finished in a month.)

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!

Dark Flame Master!

Originally I didn’t even consider watching Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! this season, but when it turned out to be one of my anime-watching-partner’s favorites, I succumbed. Even then I was all for dropping it after the first couple of episodes. Why? The unbelievably annoying main heroine and her similarly irritating servant would be the reason!

Nevertheless Chuunibyou turned out to be one of the two anime we watched on weekly basis this season, excluding those with three minutes per episode. The other one was the fourth season of Hidamari Sketch (in case you were wondering).

As this is more or less an end-of-the-season review, there are obviously going to be spoilers. With that warning out of the way, let us proceed towards my assessment.

First Impressions: Hyouka

The first episode of Hyouka aired on April 14th. Being a Kyoto Animation project, nobody wondered whether it was going to be good or bad. There was a promotional video which introduced the four main characters and gave the viewers a taste of the visual bliss that is KyoAni. It also hinted at some romance between the main characters and towards the end summarized the main plot – Hyouka is an anime series about a classic literature club, the members of which are to investigate a 33-years-old case aided by hints from a collection of works by former members of the said club. Apart from the PV, KyoAni also released beautiful character profiles and several backgrounds.

If you can’t wait for the next episode to air, you may be interested in the original work, that the anime is adapted from. It’s a 5-volume novel by Yonezawa Honobu from the year 2001.

Spring Season 2012

After a packed winter season comes a packed spring season. I wonder if anime in general is geting better or whether it’s just my standards falling.