First few episodes were a little slow, I think, but 4 and onward were really just fantastic. Luis Gerardo Méndez is a really incredible actor—the whole cast did stellar work, but Méndez is new to me.
I think I would generally pitch this show as "the closest television has, for me, come to the feeling of a Kurt Vonnegut novel." I don't know if this is getting more seasons, but I kind of hope it doesn't? These characters are great, and there's room to do more with if they choose to/get money for it, but it's just a very tight 8-episode season that feels like it tells a rock-solid story by itself, and I walked away really happy.
This show starts off as Rescue Me for people who like Top Chef, which I am not immune to, but goes into all kinds of places from there. S01E07 is maybe an all-timer episode of television, and this show really does some great stuff with affective editing and filmmaking.
It's... fine. I think a lot of my dislike of Twin Peaks comes from the creative tug of war that happened throughout this show's run. I like the David Lynch surrealist stuff, and I like the kind of teen drama murder mystery stuff, but trying to reconcile the two of them becomes a bit of a headache. I think it's worth watching, generally, but I'm not here for season 3. It's simply too long for what's there.
It's a real shame that this show never got a second season. Season 1 was and is some of my favorite comedy.
It's a Masaaki Yuasa adaptation of a Taiyo Matsumoto comic. Two great tastes that taste great together. Incredible animation, great characters, yada yada.
I think the thing I love the most about this, though, is that it's a sports anime that understands that the sports in sports anime are not the important part, it's more about the characters involved and their interactions with each other. The ending is, I think, perfect for this kind of story, and I wish it would show up more often.
This show is at it's best when it becomes a Kino's Journey-style anthology show, with the drifter coming into town to be our camera for various stories.
I usually describe the arc of Adventure time as being a show that was just kind of taking random stabs in the dark with its episodic storytelling and then eventually accumulated enough worldbuilding to start telling cohesive stories about all the incredible characters it had accumulated. With productions in the wake of Adventure Time like Steven Universe, you start to see a more cohesive and considered approach to worldbuilding, working up to larger things that are seeded RIGHT from the get-go, in ways that really reward the fandom and close consideration and rewatches and all that. Summer Camp Island takes a bit to get its engine going, but is in that same Steven Universe model. It knows what it's doing, it's doing it really well, and I'm enjoying the journey.
Season 5's anthology approach has been really nice. I don't know if it's necessarily a good starting point, but if you're curious about some of the stuff this show is doing but don't want to commit to the whole thing, I think you could treat season 5 as a kind of Over the Garden Wall-style miniseries.
Having no particular knowledge of this time period except for the vague details, I found this show to be really special. At the heart of it, this is a show about finding small bits of joy in a time of tremendous duress. It walks the line between comedy and drama incredibly well.
The vibes are off the charts. A great balance between slice of life and worldbuilding. I'm not sure we're getting another season anytime soon, but the comic is great.
Chaos reigns, and I am a willing subject.
One of my favorite comedies. Every day I wake up and mourn that it hasn't gotten another season yet.
I've never watched Fate and I probably never will, but this was a lot of fun.
Some ups and downs, but a great addition to the larger WWDitS-verse.
Sandra Oh is, of course, a treasure, and I did actually like her and Jay Duplass's scenes. That said, I think this show maybe does not handle it's own material very well. As a professor, it grossly misunderstands the relationship between teachers and students, and is too quick to make students into a nameless mob to make an antagonist. All of the concerns that the students collectively raise are legitimate, but they're never treated with seriousness.
I think the comparison here is that it would be weird today to have a period drama that's only about the Upstairs crowd and not the Downstairs crowd. It's ignoring some huge power relationships and just kind of handwaving them, and in doing that it just comes off as tonedeaf.
People are Mad about this, and I really don't understand why. Thundercats is... a really fucking corny show, y'all. It's fine, it's not bad that it's corny, but Roar understands that it's working from some really corny material and does a lot of really fun things with it. It's some of the best animation that WB has put out, tremendously expressive and fluid, and with some incredible writing and really likeable characters. Dana Snyder is great on the cast, here, also. I can only see negative responses to this being in the vein of "The Sacred Texts!!!!"
ALSO? The incredible Thundercat track that came out of this for Grune? It absolutely shreds.
Absolute nonsense, I love it. Dark Souls, Blade Runner, Alien, and the Bible shoved in a blender and a whole heap of stuff comes out.
As a casual MCU fan who was kind of burnt out through phases 2/3, this got me back on board. It's a show that understands the interesting thing about wizard* characters—having a tremendous amount of power but having none of the wisdom to use it responsibly and making a heap of Messy Mistakes.
*: a wizard has nothing to do with magic—the reason Dr. Strange and Spider-Man vibe so well is that they're both wizards in the narrative sense.
It's so fucking hard to find good queer stories in anime that don't lean too hard on BL as a (sometimes gross) genre space. This show gets a lot right in terms of queer desire. I've enjoyed it so far and will be along for whatever else they put out in the future. (The music's pretty alright, too.)
I think this show managed to thread an incredibly difficult needle, which is really anything about teen sexuality. I'm a bit far out from my watch through at this point, but with some distance I think this was a show that managed to be earnest and honest about sex (and particularly the awkwardness of it) without being just a long parade of fanservice.
There's an old adage that every war movie is anti-war, something that I think is not always true in anime. I think that holds, here, tremendously to its credit.
Simply a treat. I was so sure that the first season was so self-contained that I wrinkled my nose a bit at the prospect of a second season, but I'm fully on-board for as many seasons as they want at this point.
The first season was a fun treatment of Ultraman, kind of pulling in from the larger mythos to create a new thing that's a little more digestible. Some fun Men In Black kind of scenarios, and some decent fights for a Polygon show. The second season was... not a thing I enjoyed watching, really at all.
I had dropped this show for a while, because the first few episodes did not hit for me. I ended up coming back eventually and really enjoying it! Once the scope of the world pulls out a bit, and you start getting characters returning and things, it's great.
I think the back half was a bit rushed, I think for production issues, but overall I appreciated this show's ability to make me think I knew what was going on, only to be proven wrong. It really relies on the twists, but they tended to work for me.
It's studio dwarf, what else could you want? Cute, weird, charming, earnest, beautiful.
Medium on the Anime Tax, but I came away from it really enjoying the full arc of it, and I mean... anytime a timeskip is involved, that's an automatic win for me.
This show has a tendency to be a bit corny, particularly in the first season, but overall an incredible show. Paris is Burning (1990) is an obvious companion film for this show, but don't leave out We Were Here (2010), particularly for seasons 2 & 3.
Everyone knows the best part of Star Wars is when there are weird little creatures fucking around in the background. Prehistoric Planet has the sagacity to ask, "What if dinosaurs were like that?"
If it weren't for the middle third of this show revolving around Kabe and eschewing it's own premise, this would have been fantastic. I don't know that I'd recommend this beyond the first few/last few episodes.
I started rewatching Dennou Coil after this, another delightful show. I think the hallmark of Mitsuo Iso shows is a very fully-fleshed out vision of what technology does or can look like in the world. Simple concepts, executed fully and very well. I'm not sure this show is better as an OVA rather than a movie, but I had a great time with it. Looking forward to more directorial stuff from Iso.
