Granted that it is a bit unsettling that it reveals the deep, dark secrets early on, so there’s virtually no goofball Vash before serious Vash appears, I don’t really mind that all that much. That was a fascinating tonal shift the first time through the original, but on rewatches, it was more sort of weird, since goofball Vash seems out of place when you know the rest of the story.

Meryl in Stampede is interesting. In the original, she starts off bossy, then shifts to sort of tsundere, before finally (and admittedly very rewardingly) opening up, and just in time to remind Vash of Rem. In Stampede, she starts off naive and earnest and kindhearted, so there’s no need to break through her defenses - she’s already the positive influence she needs to be. And it’s interesting to see her toughen up, which should make for a satisfying role in Stargaze. And her reputation as “Derringer Meryl” gets some very satisfying context.

I like seeing Zazie get a bigger role - they really need to be integral to much of the story, as the representative of basically the entire planet, and that seems to be the way it’s going.

The best part of Stampede IMO though is Wolfwood, since he gets some much-needed background development. It’s not entirely new, but it goes into more detail than it did in the original, and provides better context for his character.

All in all, and even now, the second time through, I liked it. It’s just good in and of itself, and if the original didn’t exist, that’s all it would be. Since the original exists, it can’t help but be compared (and be reflexively hated by some simply for existing), but again, I don’t think it’s notably either better or worse - just different.

It’s an oujosama, a childish jock/genki girl, a meek and earnest meganekko and a quiet and awkward outsider, who just happens to have grown up with a father who was seriously into survival, and took her all over the world and taught her how to survive in the wild. So part of it is of course them trying to survive, but they don’t face any great threats and the one girl is so ridiculously skilled that they do pretty well (with predictable problems caused by the ojousama and the genki girl), so it really works out to be more sort of odd slice of life than anything else. It’s not great entertainment, but it’s amusing and low key and doesn’t require much attention, which was what I needed after Stampede. And a brief note - the series is actually remarkable in one respect - the final episode has a scene that as far as I know is entirely unique and that is… startling. There’s no telling how any specific individual will react to it - there’s a wide range of possible reactions - but it’s guaranteed that you will remember it. And no - I’m not going to spoil it. I’m sure you can find a spoiler on any anime site, but if you’re interested, you’re better off letting yourself be surprised. Probably.

Diana in the audience at Shiny Chariot’s show, all of Akko’s reactions, Chariot’s gloriously awkward but showy wand moves, backflipping up onto her broom then riding it like a skateboard, Shiny Arc and the fireworks reflected in Akko’s eyes, Ursula is the first person you see at the school, Akko’s nose, Diana’s “gokigenyou,” the hat the witch in charge of flight training wears, the spot-on Wile E Coyote homage when Akko tries to fly, the Dragon Warrior music and sound effects in the background when Ursula is explaining their dungeon mission, Akko literally on fire with excitement, Lotte and the light fairy, the bully girls turned cowards, Akko hearing the commotion when the minotaur appears and running off screen one direction then immediately reappearing from an entirely different direction, Sucy and the minotaur, the quiet little interlude when the girls float down with their wand mini-broom brush things, the cowardly bully girls immediately turning back into bullies when the dragon appears so small and feeble, then immediately turning back into cowards when it grows, Ursula’s bullhorn spell, Akko stopping Diana from taking off by grabbing the bristles on her broom, Diana’s face when she stops her, Akko finding the Shiny Rod, the moment when Ursula recognizes it, Akko on the back of Lotte’s broom - “I could have flown myself!” “Of course you could have - it just might’ve taken you all day.”, Akko’s wonderfully animated run/slide/run past the dragon to get the stone, the moment when she hears Chariot’s voice, Shiny Arc again and the look on the dragon’s face when it realizes what’s happening, Diana rescuing Akko then going all tsundere when Akko calls her out for knowing what Shiny Arc is, Ursula’s reveal.

It’s just terrific, from the first frame to the last.

It’s a period Mafia drama, and period dramas set overseas are generally sort of an odd thing to experience in anime, since the Japanese dialogue is sort of a pointless extra step in the middle of it all. Since I watch subs, they might as well be in the native language - in this case, either Italian or English - and that would fit better. But, though I don’t know enough of it to really say, it did seem that there was something going on with the dialogue in this one - like it was maybe actually Japanese with an Italian accent? In any event, even though they were speaking Japanese, it sort of broadly sounded sufficiently Italian to me that it worked fine.

More than anything else, it was beautifully crafted. The art, music and sound were all exceptional (the beach scene was especially well done). And it was surprisingly well written - it covered a lot of familiar ground, but with intriguing and unexpected twists. It’s brutal and tragic, so I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I was very, very impressed and satisfied.

Equa is a marvelous character, and the whole cast works well. It’s very episodic through the first 9 episodes, and some of them are better than others (episode 8 is the standout - quite seriously one of the most beautiful and touching anime episodes I’ve ever seen), but then, surprisingly enough, it pulls everything together - all sorts of unexpected bits and pieces from the past episodes - for the last three, and it’s really pretty impressive. And the reappearance of one of the characters (if you’ve seen it, you know who I mean) is truly epic. The ending tramples all over the limits of my suspension of disbelief, but I can forgive it that, just because it’s enjoyable. And, as always, I was reminded of how much I like the OP.

It can’t really be anything else - not only is it following a formula - it’s following the same formula Initial D used, with only a few updates (like the droning commentary being supplied by professional race announcers rather than random guys standing by the side of the road). But it’s doing a fine job all in all of following the admittedly proven formula, so that’s okay.

And speaking of Initial D, this episode of MF Ghost did have one moment of pure awesome, when the announcers are reminiscing about Takumi - the protagonist of Initial D and the mentor of the protagonist of MF Ghost - and I suddenly realized that I could faintly hear Rage Your Dream - the immortal ED of Initial D Stage One - playing in the background.

I do have one issue with the series - an ongoing one - and this’ll give me a chance to kick it out of my brain. The whole “but his car’s so underpowered” thing, which was central to Initial D and thus central to this as well, is already plainly asinine, since the two dominant cars so far, other than his, have been a Porsche Cayman and an Alpine A110. So every time someone starts rattling on about how he can’t win unless he gets a more powerful car to compete with the Ferraris and Lamborghinis, I have to fight the urge to shout at the screen.

They are literally a pair of movies. They’re set in a near future in which the existence of parallel universes has been proven and a new field of science has grown up around them. The protagonist’s life branched radically at the point of one choice he made as a child, leading to two notably different futures. Relatively early in his life the two parallel universes briefly overlap, then much later, and by design, they do again. The two movies tell the story of those events, one from the point of view of one timeline and the other from the other. So whichever movie you watch first (I watched them in the order I listed them above), you see the life of that version of the protagonist, and only get the bits of the other version that you can pick up from the times when they overlap. Then with the second movie, you get all of the context behind all of those bits you picked up in the first movie, plus that protagonist’s interpretation of the events of the overlaps. It’s technically intriguing, but it’s also touching and thoughtful, as you see the profound effects seemingly simple choices can have on lives. I really enjoyed them.

A lot of what I like about it is that Uka is an unusually accurate portrayal of social anxiety (something with which I’m all too familiar). Most portrayals don’t get it right (the Bocchi the Rock adaptations are especially bad, but that’s another rant for another day), presumably because the people writing it haven’t actually experienced it, so they’re just sort of guessing. But Honey Lemon Soda nails it with Uka.

But the thing that I really appreciate about it - it’s often compared to Kimi ni Todoke, and I can see the similarities, but Kimi ni Todoke gets it all entirely wrong. Shouta treats Sawako one of two ways, alternating between being overly considerate and being awkward and avoiding her, and both of those are awful ways to deal with social anxiety, since the first is demeaning and the second is only what you pessimistically expect. With Honey Lemon Soda though, Kai forces himself into Uka’s life just enough to get her attention, then just sort of points her in the right direction and waits for her to sort things out for herself, while making sure that she knows that if she really needs saving, he’ll be there, but other than that, she’s pretty much on her own. And that’s perfect - it’s enough of a goad to keep her going, and enough security to give her the courage she needs, but without making her his focal point, which would just make her feel pressured. And the whole thing is neatly summed up when Serina - Kai’s gorgeous ex-girlfriend who’s introduced as a suspected love rival - says that the difference between them is that being with Kai made her weaker, but it makes Uka stronger. And it does.

And it was brutal and frightening and sad, and oddly, stubbornly optimistic, and very, very good. I liked pretty much everything about it (even the ending, which is a montage of scenes presumably from events from the manga, and a pretty significant timeskip). A particularly notable thing about it to me was that the animation and the sound were both very good, but I only noticed them from time to time because I was so caught up in the characters and the story. That’s the way it should be IMO.

It’s about a naively earnest and determined girl who had basically been the grown-up to her irresponsible mother, right up until her mother took off with her boyfriend, and dumped Iroha off on her grandmother - a cold and domineering taskmaster who runs a hot spring inn. It’s pretty much pure SOL, with very little ongoing plot to speak of, but as should be the case with SOLs, the characters and their interactions and growth more than make up for it. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. The only downside so far is that the OP of the first cour is so far up into high-pitched little girl voice range that it makes my ears hurt, but that’s what skip is for.

I went into it knowing that it was an essentially automatically cheesy fake romance between two people who initially hate each other, and that it was a Shaft, which meant lots of oddly unpopulated geometric abstract liminal spaces and insipid conversations pretending to be profound, and even that the already cheesy set-up went the extra cheese mile by making the fake romance a mechanism to prevent a rival gang family war. And even prepared as I was, it overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief. Mostly it was the ensemble scenes of groups of scarfaced gangsters all simultaneously cheering on this make-believe high school romance, as if it was the single most important thing in the universe, but in the end it was that one guy with scary shiny glasses who decided that the actual most important thing in the universe was proving that the romance was a fake. It’s anime, so I have a very low bar for suspension of disbelief, and this one couldn’t even manage to meet that. Now that said, I can’t imagine that they’ll go 20 episodes with gangsters constantly popping up like Broadway choruses to squee with delight over the fake romance of two high-schoolers while scary shiny glasses stands off to the side and fumes, so I might give it another shot sometime, since the three main characters were actually relatively appealing. We’ll see…

It’s a sort of contrived drama (certainly not coincidentally) in the spirit of Drifting Classroom, but aside from a few broad strokes and basic concepts, it’s very much its own thing. The thing that’s drifting in this case is the scheduled-to-be-demolished apartment building in which the two main characters, currently estranged from each other, grew up happily together, and it’s literally drifting - floating - out to sea, trapping those two and a handful of their mutual friends. And to reach back a bit, that’s certainly an even less believable scenario than Nisekoi, but they handled it well enough that my suspension of disbelief was never even challenged. It was quite good all in all - it’s a difficult but ultimately rewarding watch. The only real issue I had with it was a personal one - the male lead was the Japanese character archetype I hate the most - the angry coward. He was one of those prideful assholes who’s desperately insecure and self-doubting and unhappy, and tries to make up for it by scowling and being angry essentially full time, and they’re just like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. But it was fairly obvious he was on a redemption arc, so I stuck with it, and eventually he pulled his head out of his ass. And it was all worth it in the long run.

It’s about a depressed and very down-on-his-luck musician when ends up adopting a sweetly naive but barely functional and unrepairable robot he finds abandoned on a scrap heap. It could’ve easily tipped over into being devastatingly sad, since it’s made clear from early on that she really is unrepairable, so the ending is pretty much preordained, but it still managed to mix in enough hope and joy that it worked out to charmingly bittersweet and even a bit optimistic in the end. I liked it.

It was pretty poor all in all, but not because there was anything specific wrong with it. It was more as if someone took dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime and mixed them all together and ended up with… dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime arbitrarily mixed together. Taken by themselves, the characters were at least okay, the set-up was potentially interesting and the way the story unfolded was potentially satisfying. But nothing fit with anything else. It almost felt like it was done by a committee - as if one team built a framework and designated a bunch of slots in the framework for different characters and different story events while a different team designed a bunch of characters and events to spec, then a third team just wedged the characters and events they were given into the corresponding slots and called it good. And for all I know, that might be pretty much exactly how it did happen. In any event, it was pretty bad, though in an oddly interesting way.

The characters are terrific (and, as they constantly remind us, cute) and the dialogue is bizarre and intriguing and stupidly funny, so it works as a sort of surreal SOL CGDCT iyashikei comedy - sort of a cross between Nichijou, K-On and Food Court de Mata Ashita - and I love it.

At no point in that entire movie could I predict what was going to happen next, and I finally just gave up and let it wash over me. It seems like it should’ve ended up feeling arbitrary, since it all unfolded so unpredictably, but somehow it all made sense. Sort of. I think. In any event, I enjoyed it. And odd though it was, I loved the art style.

I intended to just watch the whole series, but it’s one of those series - more than anything else, it reminded me of the Kara no Kyoukai movie series, which is to say each of the six 45 minute episodes is an independent story from some point along the shared timeline of the main characters, and while there is an overarching plot of sorts, it’s being revealed in bits and pieces along the way rather than playing out straightforwardly. It’s quite good, but the individual episodes are a bit exhausting and the way it’s playing out means that I don’t necessarily have to watch it straight through, and after two episodes, I was ready for a break.

It started off with a childhood friend, then added a fake girlfriend, then a meek chuuni, then finally a particularly cute tsundere. It was mostly pretty standard, but with a couple of oddities. First, the protagonist is probably the most incredibly dense harem protag I’ve ever seen. That was actually okay though. I think the thing that made it okay was that it wasn’t just a gimmick that showed up as necessary to keep the harem intact - he really was just that dense, pretty much full time. The other oddity though was that the fake girlfriend was an entirely foul and loathsome bitch, and that’s not just my opinion - that was the stated reality in-universe. Even the protag thought she was awful. And as it went on, her continued presence in the harem just made less and less sense, particularly after the protag finally figured out what was going on with the other three and the other three figured out that she was a fake. But still, there she was, poisoning everything and everyone around her.

I think the author was trying to make a point about redemption or hidden value or tolerance or something like that, but since the basic arc was that she was utterly loathsome, but the protag was kind to her anyway, and… she continued to be utterly loathsome, there was never any pay-off, so whatever the point was supposed to be, it got lost. More than anything else, it struck me as a failed effort.