Carole & Tuesday – First Impressions

There are only a few director/creators in anime that their mere name is enough to make a sizable portion of anime fandom commit to watching their shows. This blue moon of a season happens to have two such director/creators. The first is Shinichirou Watanabe with his work – Carole & Tuesday – and the second is Kunihiko Ikuhara with his work – Sarazanmai. Of the two, I was more curious about Carole & Tuesday because one kinda already knows what one will get with Ikuhara (interesting story wrapped in a bonkers, memorable, animation style) and I wanted to see if Shinichirou Watanabe can channel his inner Shoji Kawamori.

Mix: Meisei Story – First Impressions

With the third season of Chihayafuru being delayed to this autumn, Mix: Meisei Story easily became the anime I was most looking forward to from the new Spring 2019 season which makes it the logical place to start my coverage for the season. And because it’s already got a couple unrelated-to-the-actual-anime strikes against it, I also feel the need to help draw people’s attention to what will hopefully and probably be one of the best titles of the season.

Mahou Shoujo Site – First Impressions

There are various reasons that can convince me to try a new anime. Probably one of the most dubious reasons is because I picked it for my team for MAL’s Fantasy Anime League competition; I learned long ago that my tastes in anime don’t often jive with the best scoring series. I picked Mahou Shoujo Site for my team this season based on it’s high plan-to-watch number, did the numerous MAL users steer me to a good series or not?

Gegege no Kitarou – First Impressions

The Spring 2018 season is here and there are plenty of anime series vying for attention. I’m not sure how many I can get to, but, there are a number of interesting (both in a positive and in a negative sense) new shows that I’d like to cover. The first is Gegege no Kitarou, a supernatural comedy shounen series produced by Toei Animation.

The Anime Recap Episode – # 6: January 2018

New year, new season of anime, and a new group of finished series that people will either quickly forget having existed (Juuni Taisen) or will be relieved are finally done (Children of the Whales) so they can finish wasting their time waiting for these series to “get good” or were part of the select few that were good enough people will spend the upcoming months/years hoping for a sequel to be made (Houseki no Kuni). I hope to get to a proper look back at the best anime of 2017 soon; for today, we are focusing on the new anime that began airing for the Winter 2018 season.

Traditionally, the winter and summer seasons are considered the weaker seasons of the year with winter being the weakest overall. Outside of a couple obvious must-watch series it looked like the Winter 2018 season was going to follow the narrative and I would be able to do some catching up on my anime backlog. Then, as it has often occurred in the past, when I started watching the series I thought I would be able to write off, I discovered many of these series could not be so easily dismissed.

I don’t think I’ll find the time this season to tackle my anime backlog and I have the feeling that I still am missing a series from this season I should be watching. So, instead of asking the people reading this to recommend an old show, I’ll be asking which series I should be watching this season. Read on to see which three series the potential pick-ups.

The Anime Recap Episode – # 5: October 2017

As the last bits of summer gave way to the falling leaves, October saw the ending of the summer season of anime and the start of the fall season of anime. I intended to be a proper anime blogger this month; I was going to watch as many of the new shows as possible and write first impression posts of them. It’s been a long time since I last tried to watch more than a cherry-picked group of new shows at the start of a new season and I kinda missed that feeling one gets when realizing they’d stumbled upon a terrible new anime series. I was only partially successful, as the almost month long lack of posts can attest to. I did get to watch a large number of the new series – I’m currently watching 22 – but, the time to write about these series dried up this month as I discovered that rereading the first two books of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive was as engrossing as the first time I read them. I thought knowing what happens would have allowed this second time through to be a more relaxed reading experience but I was wrong. There were a long string of days that I lost 1 – 2 hours of sleep a night because I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Oh well, maybe next time.

So, this is my first chance to talk about the new season of anime and I have a lot of ground to cover.