Anime 2023 and a bit

I took the opportunity to catch Suzume when it was playing at the local arthouse cinema. For the first film in-theatre in almost a decade, and first Shinkai since I noped out of 5cm/s at a frozen railway platform, it made a good occasion to get back into each of those.

First and foremost, the boy-meets-girl strand is not played as the core of the movie, but comes about 3rd or 4th in the queue, after such things as chasing trouble-making cats, and saving Japan when there aren't Yūsha or Tōji around to deal with a problem more of the sort they are geared up for. And it does have the visual lushness that we expect from a Shinkai movie. Nothing too profound, but certainly more than worth the time spent.

One remarkable thing about the movie, in retrospect, is that the associated McDonalds ad could be considered to contain a "canon deleted scene" - while there are many sponsors of the movie who have had co-promotions containing some excerpts (e.g. Narita Airport), the McD ad is one comprised entirely of animation, only part of which appears in the actual movie.

For TV shows, a glitch with Crunchy lasting from late July to mid November meant there was a big gap in watching, but the general quality of the airing shows meant that it hardly made a noticeable difference to my watching.

Released from the paywall, I finished LycoReco. Having started out as a cute girls do black ops series, it suffered the usual fate of series that start mostly episodic then grow a plot. The tale of a genki-girl natural born assassin who's all Sixth Commandment all the time doing clandestine peacekeeping activities would have been fine by itself, without bringing in a pound-shop Joker as a running antagonist. A sad case of a story having far more than just the one implausibility, almost an example of why you don't do that. Harmless to frustrating.

Birdie Wing (1st cour) suffers another of the standard anime tics. MC, who is a legend in the world of clandestine gambling golf, and sees off other mob-owned players on an amazing mutable underground course meets another player who might be her equal - and then gets a special entry into an Under-15s tournament to play against her. Yep, this legend with a significant track record is another 14 year old prodigy. Mid-cour, the mafia element wraps up and suddenly it's a Japanese high-school golf tournament in the same vein as, say, New Prince of Tennis, right up to the point where the cour ends and we have to wait for the second to air, a year after the first. Decent enough time-filler, pity about the cliff-hanger.

Yurei Deco, or The Adventures of Hack'n'Berry, Finn, and the Detective Club on Tom Sawyer Island was an interesting sub-Matrix style soft dystopia, with a couple of surprise (at least to me) gender reveals. I didn't notice whether there was any discussion of this elsewhere at the time, but it seemed one of those series that fly under the radar, and thus get under-appreciated. Good.

Shadows House S1 definitely speed-ran what was a long atmosphere building introduction to get to the first major event of the series, and its immediate consequences. S2 recovered well from the first season's uncertain adaptation, and reached a logical pausing point without rushing matters. Verdict: Good, recommended.

The Case Study of Vanitas - it's shoujo, it's silly, and if LycoReco is yuri-bait, then this is definite yaoi-bait. But then you expect a story of vampires in c1900s Paris to be full of raging haemosexuals anyway. In all, it was, let's say, interesting, though the mood whiplash from drama to slapstick and back got a little tiring after a while; but it's always interesting to see an anime take on places I've actually visited. Verdict: mostly harmless. Watch Brotherhood of the Wolf for a take on the same material as inspired the second cour that doesn't suffer from out of place levity.

Running through into the new year, from the backlog, Wonder Egg Priority which was a mess - so many things handwaved into the plot in the last few episodes to keep things happening, and then dropped or left dangling. Verdict - to travel hopefully is far better than to end in a soggy thud.

Ditto for Vivy : Fluorite's Eye Song which has the disadvantage of having become so dated in such a very short time. It kept itself together somewhat better at the end, though gave no explanation as to e.g. why going back a few more hours for the do-over to the do-over wasn't a thing. It was better when it was being an idol anime than anything else. I was amused by the ep 3 "Hotel Sunrise" disaster - of course it's a colony drop : with that name, it had to be.

Adding to the "and a bit", Caught The Boy and the Heron in the first week of January '24. It was OK (enough that I didn't feel annoyed about having to take my least favourite route home for night riding because of flooding on the quieter ones), but I feel that The Wind Rises would have stood as a better finisher, rather than doing one more encore. I wonder what his next movie will be. It felt to me that the film was rather about Miyazaki reconciling himself to the fact that Goro hasn't taken up the torch, and wonder about past events that might have surfaced in the film. Like that self-inflicted injury that I was sure was going to lead to wrath descending on the kid who'd bullied him, but went nowhere beyond writing the school back out of the story.

I tried a couple of episodes (prologue and Ep1) of G-Witch; and the former was a generic enough AU Gundam set up, seemingly entirely set aside in a first episode that hit the all beats of "Utena in Mobile-suits" (as has been the apparent summary of the series). Alas, Suletta is no Tenjou-san - indeed I can't offhand think of another example of such a wittering ninny as the eponymous witch in the MC role, at least in anything I stuck with. Haven't watched any further

Also, still in progress, a 20-years-later rewatch of Evangelion.

So that just leaves me with One Piece as an on-going thing, which is frankly better than most of the above for having less pretensions to start with.