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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
I've been watching City (The Animation). It's the next series by the guy who made Nichijou. To be honest, this caught me by surprise. I hadn't really been following the anime adaptation at all. I had read and mostly enjoyed the manga, but the anime is like 10x better. It's possibly one of the best animated anime I've watched, period. Not to mention that they are nailing the timing of the comedy (which can sometimes suffer in comedic manga adaptations).
It sucks that it doesn't look like it's catching on that much. It's obvious that KyoAni is spending a lot of money on the show, so unless it's a big hit it probably won't be getting a second season. It's hard to tell if it's just that the western audience doesn't care as much though. It's definitely a style of comedy that I don't think will appeal to everyone.
I'd recommend City if you enjoyed Nichijou. City is more ambitious with it's scope, it has a much larger cast, with a lot of clever intertwining of storylines. It takes the same kind of approach as Nichijou and uses it to quickly jump between set pieces all over the City, which can be a little jarring, but generally comes together well. The latest episode featured a really impressive simultaneous cut of like 8 different character groups all at once, plus some claymation/stop motion smoothly blended with animation.
I still personally like Nichijou better just because there are some regulars in CITY which I do not find funny at all (whereas I love the whole cast of Nichijou), but some of the direction in this show is so good! Episode 5 in particular must have taken a Herculean effort to make.
Arawi Keiichi currently also has a new serial Amemiya-san which I think will appeal to those who like CITY, but I'm in complete agreement that his style of comedy is way more enjoyable as anime.
I finished Mawaru Penguindrum a couple days ago. I loved it. Two things stand out to me: one, it's pretty. The animation is absolutely gorgeous, and I like the character designs a lot. Two, it's weird. Good weird. It shares a lot of DNA with Revolutionary Girl Utena, and sits on the same shelf in my brain as Kyousougiga and Sonny Boy.
It's also very confusing. As convoluted and esoteric as the show is, one thing about it is perfectly clear: it's a story about love. What I find most interesting about it is that it isn't the sanitized, all-positive, incorruptible thing that many stories make it out to be. Love is messy, it can hurt you and make you hurt others. That's not to say it's a bad thing, just that it's complex. The show explores these themes in great detail.
This is one of those shows that it's really hard for me to write about, because it's so very inscrutible. That paragraph is about all I've got. Strong recommend if you like "Weird (Non-Pejorative)" as a genre. I'm giving it a 10.
Ikuhara Kunihiko, the director for both Utena and Penguindrum, does not miss! If you enjoyed these, chances are you'll also enjoy his other shows Yuri Kuma Arashi and Sarazanmai which are both stylistically very similar.
Furukawa Tomohiro, who was assistant director for Yuri Kuma Arashi, also went on to do Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight which has an extremely heavy Utena influence and is also great.
I only discovered they share a director after I finished the show, and I was not surprised. The ritualistic repetition of musical sequences, the surreal settings, and the exploration of love and self sacrifice all mark the shows as closely related.
I was hoping I was done adding anime to my list when my VPN expired last month and I had to take my "media center" laptop offline, but Yurikuma Arashi and Sarazanmai are already near the top of the list. Gonna have to find a VPN that works on Linux. I already have years worth of anime to watch, and the list grows faster than I can watch them
To Be Hero X
Technically since this one is made in China it might not fall under the category of anime but it follows all of the substance, style and art direction* of an anime.
This one however was a MASSIVE surprise for me for both story and production value. It does away entirely with exposition and throws you right into the action to piece together the lore of the world in an organic way while still delivering an insane number of twists and turns via several separate 3-4 episode character arcs that eventually all tie in together.
It has a sort of vibe like one might get from The Boys in that its a world where super heroes are commonplace and heavily corporatized with their own PR firms and the like. Where a super heroes power ends up being directly tied to how many people believe they are a super hero, which ends up making them heavily reliant on metrics and showboating to keep themselves as popular as possible so that they in turn can be as powerful as possible. But the story is always told in a way that keeps you glued to the edge of your seat as sudden curveballs get thrown into the mix to make you completely change your expectations as to where you think the story is going.
They also made a really interesting choice with the art style in that it will constantly shift from comic book style, traditional anime or CGI depending on what sort of scene is happening at the time. It will even dramatically shift art styles in the middle of a battle as events happen which I've found they've used to really amazing effect. I can't recommend this one enough if only for its unique approach and doing a very effective "show don't tell" method of story telling that doesn't insult your intelligence. Definitely give it a watch!
Edit: also to add, the English dub is phenomenal I can't imagine how much money was spent on voice actors for it. It's not just what I would call acceptable but what I would highly recommend being the default way to watch it.
Link Click (by the same director)
If you liked To Be Hero X, I'd also recommend checking out Li Haoling's previous work, Link Click. It's a 2D animated time-travel mystery / thriller, with high production quality, really tight pacing, and emotional gut-punch moments.
Pacing is similar to To Be Hero X, dropping you right into the premise straight from the start. It's got well-structured storytelling, with little details that pay off in big ways later. Link Click builds tension like crazy and drops heavy plot twists, some that hit you like an emotional sucker punch (in one episode, I genuinely cried).
Its time travel concept is extremely well executed. The premise starts off with two friends who can glean the past via photos, taking cases from people who request their services. The main character enters photos by being the photo-taker for 12 hours. His friend guides him from the present and keeps him on track. While the MC is in the past, he bears the emotions and memories of the person he's possessing. This causes tension with the one strict rule they've agreed to: the MC must never change the past no matter what; the past ought to occur as it did.
Despite the differing premise, you can see Li Haoling developing his distinct "show don't tell" approach to storytelling.
I think the original Chinese sub is the best, but the English dub is still pretty good (don't recommend the Japanese dub. It's been cut and edited to fit television slots).
Also, season 2's opening is amazing. Very unique concept, where the second half of the song is the first half reversed. Personally, it's in my top 10 anime openings.
I sat down and caught up on Kingdom after a few months not reading it. I'm looking forward to later in life when the manga is finished and doing a long reread. It feels like a seinen manga with a shonen style protagonist. I can't help but root for him and get excited seeing him grow and fight strong opponents, even when he is in the midst of brutal and bloody wars.
I've planned on doing a similar reread with One Piece as well, and thought I would do it with Naruto, but that is a maybe one day if I feel like after I found the ending underwhelming at the time. I might even through Hajime No Ippo in there, as my reread/catch up of that stalled when I got to the first Vorg fight for some reason.
I've done a manga "book club" with a group of friends for years, with the goal being 10 chapters a week, but the pace has slowed down over the years as we all are busier and life gets in the way. One of the guys in the group was someone who I initially did this with for a couple of years, but as life gets busy he has been absolutely slammed with work, so our own read through hasn't made much progress this year.
Another one of those friend and I are going to start up reading Slam Dunk. I loved the manga when I read it years ago even though I'm not a big basketball fan, and I'm guessing this will take us the next 2-3 years to read through it together. I've really enjoyed the format of chatting about the plot and finding panels that we send as memes to each other.
The thing I love about Kingdom is that it's like the typical "evil empire" story being told from the empire's perspective. One of the themes that constantly comes up throughout the story is that Qin's conquest comes at the cost of destroying lives, families and other cultures (and that's putting aside all the atrocities of war which everyone other than Li Shin's unit is implied to be committing), all in the name of making "China" - this "better place" where there's no longer a need for warlords to be fighting each other all the time because authority is now centralised - a reality.
It's the sort of thing you'd expect from a JRPG villain's motivation speech if it didn't happen for real!
A good friend of mine recommended Houseki No Kuni/Land of the Lustrous to me, and I'm slowly reading the manga trying desperately not to binge it in one go. As I am really enjoying it, though barely 20 chapters in my heart has already been ripped once. And I can tell it's going to be a whole lot more in the future. ;_;
It's really good though. It has a very unusual kind of worldbuilding, in a somewhat melancholic and beautiful way. It takes a lot of effort for me to not keep reading it.
Absolutely loved the anime adaptation for this and would recommend it even above the manga (which is also very good; just feels like the voicework, art direction and action were all well done and really add to it). The downside is that the anime doesn't cover the full manga and it's been so long that there's unlikely to be a second season.
I get the impression that the remainder of the manga's story (after the part covered by the anime) is pretty divisive, but when I gave up on waiting and read it, I personally thought it was the logical conclusion for the protagonist's character arc. Will be interested to hear what you think!