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.

Summer 2014 Mid-Season Anime Report – Part 2: #13 to #9, The Okay Stuff

What’s strange about this season of anime is that it appears to feature anime series that are either not very good (hence the 10 series covered yesterday) or pretty good (the 8 series to be covered in the near future) with few series left in the middle ground of mediocrity. The five series that currently make up this group are featured below. My gut tells me that most of these series will raise up or stumble further before the end of the season. To find out if that will happen, don’t forget to tune back in for the season in review post. 🙂

Finding a Way To Make the Wonky MAL Scores Useful

I’m hardly the first person to realize the scores found on My Anime List (MAL) are not nearly as helpful as they should be. I could disparage the many users that seem allergic to using the bottom half of the grading scale or the owners of MAL for the current system and its lack of features; but, I’d rather be constructive which is why I was thrilled to discover the MAL Score Progressions club.

The MAL Score Progressions club attempts to extract actual useful data from the scores of currently airing anime.

Summer 2014 Anime Season Preview

The spring season is thankfully almost over. I’m not calling it the worst season in recent memory but I do know I routinely had trouble finding worthy series to fill all 5 spots on my weekly Anime Power Ranking ballot for the first time ever, even with watching more then 20 airing series. The biggest disappointment of the season has been JoJo. I appreciate a manga author taking risks by shifting time periods and main characters and powers like Hirohiko Araki has done with JoJo; however, Japanese Jojo and company (not including grandpa Jojo) are the weakest and blandest cast of the franchise and the bad guy of the week format does not allow any of the villains to really become memorable. I’m only going to continue watching because grandpa Jojo is still around; if something happens to him then I think I’m going to sit JoJo out until the next part gets adapted.

That’s enough dwelling on the past. Let’s turn our attention to the near future with the new season of anime. It looks like a pretty good season of anime.

I don’t mind laughing at myself; so, instead of merely listing all the new series or just the series I’m interested in, I’m going to predict which new anime series will rank in my top 10 of the summer 2014 season and revisit this list when we get to end of the season. I’m going to attempt to get this list right and pat myself on the back for my prognostication skills but I suspect its going to be hilariously wrong.

So, coming in at number 1, the anime I think will be the best new anime of summer is …