I finally gave in now. I figured that I might as well try it out a second time, especially considering how my taste has changed a lot during the past five years. And indeed, it made a totally different impression on me. I hated it once, but it’s actually a very well constructed movie. It’s not the saddest movie I’ve seen, but at the same time I can understand why this is regarded by some people as a masterpiece.

Grave of the Fireflies has a few things that set itself apart from most other WWII movies. Unlike most of them, it doesn’t start off with slice of life: it immediately throws the characters in darkness even though we hardly know anything about them at that point. After that, it’s basically the two lead characters as they try to survive after the horrible things that happened to them. Most lead characters in such a situation are written to be likable. This however is one heck of an exception. I won’t exactly go into the how and why for the sake of spoilers, but there aren’t a lot of lead characters that are more flawed than he is. And that’s what makes this movie so great.

The second point at which Grave of the Fireflies stands out is the realism. It was directed by Isao Takahata. I’ve often called this guy the king of realism, and this movie only reaffirms this. WWII-anime are already often realistic, but Grave of the Fireflies adds a whole new layer of realism with all sorts of small details and subtle touches that you can’t find in any other movie. Takahata really is one of the greatest anime directors out there: setting aside Pom Poko, there are absolutely no other series or movies that are more realistic than the works he directed.

I can’t call this a true masterpiece, though. This movie falls a bit short at fleshing out its characters. At the end of the movie, I still don’t really have the feeling that I truly know the two lead characters. While I originally dropped this movie for being too long-winded and boring, I now feel in retrospect that it easily could have been half an hour longer, so that the characters could get the time they need to properly get fleshed out.

But yeah, the Anne right now is more and more growing to become the Anne at the start of Anne of Green Gables. I honestly didn’t expect the creators to be able to pull this off. The reason she hated to be called a red head wasn’t because she was occasionally teased about it when she was young. Instead, it was because of the abuse she endured in the orphanage. In her own mind, orphanages had formed such an evil presence that she simply refused to believe that they’re not all that bad.

Her classmates and teacher also sound much more interesting than her class in Marysville. The teacher is a bit incompetent, but you can see that the children respect her. She’s not so obviously and stereotypical as Henderson was. Her classmates are also much more complex than Mildred (who was just bratty because her parents didn’t pay enough attention to her) and Randolf. These kids all had the painful experience of the loss of their parents, and yet they haven’t shut themselves in as much as Anne. Even the bookworm turned out to be the most popular girl, but in a more realistic way than you often see portrayed.

Now, the question obviously remains: is the development of these people going to go right? The next episodes are going to be a huge hit or miss again, because it’s exactly this that this series is worst at. Remember the midwife of a few episodes ago: when she first appeared, she was awesome. Then she got developed, and she turned cheesy. The kids right now are great, but half-hearted development is going to hurt them much more than making them stay the same. Right now, there are seven episodes left. What this series needs to do is make use of this time. Instead of picking out one character every episode to develop, it instead needs to focus on slice of life, and let the characters gradually come to tolerate each other.

I know that the creators can do this for Anne: they have shown this by now. Anne right now is still very elitist: she’s been so much used to look down on other kids that she needs to realize that she’s just the same as everyone else in order to remain in canon with Anne of Green Gables. I have no doubt that the creators can do this, and they need to realize that they can simply do the same thing for the other character. No need for cheese.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This arc features the adaptation of “In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom” (which I’ll just keep abbreviated as “In the Woods” from now on. Instead of the serious No Longer Human, this short takes a more light-hearted approach. At first this worried me a bit, but the deadpan humour of the lead guy was hilarious. You hardly ever see good deadpans in anime, but I really like that type of humour.

The story in this was just… weird. Which made it even better. Here we have a rugged bandit whose skills are second to none. He lives with a bunch of women he captured. His latest addition is very spoiled and bratty, so she doesn’t want to live together with them. However, the lead guy is in love with her. so what does he do? He kills off every woman but one. What?!

This episode just oozed style. Is this really an adaptation of classic literature? I can really hardly tell. The creators of the anime added the funky atmosphere, a terrific set of voice actors, a bunch of insert songs, seamlessly integrated with the story and an MP3-player. I’m not kidding. Beats me where this guy got the batteries from.

And the graphics! This episode was a visual orgasm beyond belief, and Madhouse have truly outdone themselves yet again! Some of the backgrounds looked truly fantastic here, and this definitely was the prettiest episode of this season.

Seriously, why aren’t there more series like Aoi Bungaku?? This is just utter brilliance, and you can see that the creators are throwing in lots of stuff and ideas to spice up this episode. You could see that they had a lot of fun adapting this work. I love the idea of the little specks of blood on the camera when one of the guys was killed. The pacing, the timing, just about everything felt right in this episode.
Rating: *** (Awesome)
OP: Funky, catchy and gorgeous visuals. Fits the story perfectly.

Anyway, for this review I wanted to do something special, and therefore decided to pick out a very unknown movie, watch it and hopefully give a bit of attention to a nearly forgotten gem. Thankfully, I was right in picking out Ushiro no Shoumen Dare. While not the best of the WWII movie genre, it’s a very charming and bittersweet story about a little girl, and her experiences during the war.

What I like about this movie is how down to earth it is: it doesn’t try to be overdramatic, or show as much death and destruction as possible. Instead, it focuses on the lead character, her life and her family. The major part of the airtime is mostly spent on slice of life, while the final parts of the movie show how the lead character survived through the war, and the few years after that.

The slice of life is really good. The lead character really is just like a bratty little girl, who just has fun and cries a lot when something goes wrong. A lot of details has gone into just the every day lives, and one particular thing that this movie likes to do is show off various nursery rhymes that were popular in those days. It’s an interesting watch for anyone who’s interested in the Japanese culture around these days, and it makes sure that the characters are all fleshed out well enough, when the darker parts of the story arrive, resulting in a bunch of bittersweet scenes.

The flaws in this movie simply stem from the fact that it really kept it down to the basics: While I very much assume that a lot of people have had to go through what the lead character has gone through, it does have this air of “been there, done that”. The dramatic parts of the movie, while sad, are also one-sided. When you compare this to other similar movies like Chochhan’s story, which was much more balanced and interesting, I just can’t label it among the best ones of the genre.

Nevertheless though, if you’re into this genre of realistic war stories, then it’s definitely worth the watch. At the moment it’s pretty difficult to track this movie down, but if you happen to find it, why not give it a chance?

Anyway, as for this episode: i don’t understand why people were complaining about the lack of development for Knox during the previous episode: he actually got some attention in this episode. We see some of his past apprentices, what has become of them and we got to see a glimpse of the work he did in the past. To me, this seems like the creators have decided rearrange a bunch of chapters. Have some faith, will you?

In any case, this was clearly a build-up episode so there’s not a lot to say about it, other than that we finally get the proper introduction of Kimbley. thankfully he seems less stereotypically evil, although the scene between him and Envy was a bit too much of a contest to see who could create the biggest evil grin (like I said: the facial expressions in this episode were just OFF).
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Now this is subtlety! No longer do we just see Kou and Aoba fighting, but now that Akane has joined the mix, the two of them also start acting completely different towards each other, and yet they haven’t forgotten to sneak subtle jabs at each other in the middle of their conversations. A bit weird were the parts in which Kou stopped that naked dude who terrorized Akane’s school and Aoba, who protected Akane from those very stupid (yet somewhat endearing) high school punks, but they were nevertheless a lot of fun.

I’d still be here tomorrow evening if I were to mention every clever bit about this episode, so let´s just say that I laughed a lot. There were so many fun details in it. I probably liked the part in which the father saw the image of his dead daughter. It´s like he said, he heard the rumours, but his face was nevertheless priceless. I even didn’t mind the scene in which Kou ran into Akane changing. It´s a staple of all teen-aged romance series, but the way that the creators carried this one out was just too adorable.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I’m utterly astonished at this episode. It was such a powerful proverbial kick in the groin that it gives the entire story an entire new direction. Show for kids? Charming story about a young woman and her trusty Beast King? Hah! Think again! This episode more than anything showed the mature and downright brutal nature of this series. I’m completely amazed at how far this episode went, and it’s also the episode of this series that has made the most impact on me.

After the death of the queen, you’d expect a slow-paced battle between Erin, as she tries to keep Lilan out of Damya’s clutches. That was Erin’s plan too, but here Lilan comes, attacks the royal guard, kills one of these people AND BITES OFF THREE OF ERIN’S FINGERS! Holy crap. It’s this series’ way of saying: don’t mess with beasts. They’re dangerous. It completely nullifies Erin’s wishes to be a beast player without the use of a mute whistle: this episode was a really hard lesson for her to never underestimate the power of these things.

Also, what’s going to happen next? I originally thought that the final episodes of this series would focus on the upcoming war, but this episode really changes everything. Erin doesn’t run away like a coward, but she has to bear the responsibility for killing one soldier, and injuring another. Lilan… I have no idea what’s going to happen to her. Common sense dictates that she’s simply going to have to be executed, but is everything really going to end that simple? After all, Erin was the one who proved the theory wrong that only the queen could control the beast kings, he might have some plans for her.

Is there really not going to be some sort of second season?
Rating: **** (Fantastic)

I should have known. I should have bloody known. Don’t get me wrong, this episode wasn’t exactly bad. The creators just did it again: as if the current storyline wasn’t already screwed up enough: the long-haired singer girl starts flirting with Touya. Technically though: I can’t fault this series: it was well built up, they both have their reasons (they both want to run away and ended up flirting with the nearest person possible, and just happened to be at the right time and place that made sense in the overall storyline), but holy crap. It’s a good thing that Haruka and Mana are taking a break or else all hell would really break loose. However, that eventual climax seems to be even more disastrous at this point.

But yeah, as much as I hate to admit it: the second season of White Album is actually pretty good. The first season definitely had its issues, mostly introducing pointless angst and emo. In the second season however, the angst is anything but pointless. In this episode, Yuki broke down crying, but who can fault her? She just found out that her boyfriend has been deceiving her with her best friend. It feels like something out of a bad soap opera, but it’s actually well built up. If you take everything that happened in the first season into account, this had to happen. Can this series still be called bad? In fact, I’m actually glad that we might get a School Days-like ending that doesn’t feel forced and instead consists out of genuine drama, and that doesn’t get bogged down by a terrible script, character-development or pointless fanservice.

Out of all eroge adaptations I watched, this one has the most realistic animation and quiet parts. As much as I hate to admit it, this series can only be seen as a step forward in this genre that lives off seeing who rip each other off the most.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

And guess which characters were fleshed out with this episode? Norotei is the focus of the second half of the episode, which does make sense. It’s great to see her with a bit more detail, since she wasn’t really in the spotlight before. The first half however, focused on the background of that other Meat-guy that Colio was with. Holy hell!? I thought he was only a minor cardboard character?! These creators really want to give everyone the chance to tell their story, don’t they?

What I loved about this episode were the differences in everyone’s beliefs: the gap between young and old. There were the leader of the church and Segal with their twisted mind of killing, versus Colio’s friend, who has nothing to live for and hasn’t experienced anything. Then there’s the naive Norotei versus the battle-hardened Hamyuts. It’s a very nice view on experience versus rookies without copying what any other show has done before. Excellent.

However, as much as I love this series, I am going to have to be a bit critical here. With as much details that this series puts to its fights and battles, I was a bit disappointed at how weak that bad guy’s powers of electicity are. With shocks that bad, it’s a miracle that Minth survived. That thunder felt more like media thunder than real thunder. A chance missed.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

What I mean by that is the following: this episode was very similar to the previous one: a writerbaseball player is very popular, however he experiences psychological problems off of it. Parallels are drawn between him and a different writerbaseball player. Irabu meanwhile tries to take up writingplaying catch-ball and he eventually gets cured by realizing that he was wrong in his stereotypical assumptions.

After four episodes, I finally realize that the similarities of the stories isn’t lazy scriptwriting, but instead meant to be that way. This episode wasn’t meant to stand out with its story, but rather with the subtle difference with the previous story. Ignoring the second episode, this series has been about people who are very successful at what they do, but just have a problem as they’re at the height of their popularity. It could be failing to cooperate, or simply forgetting the past. They’re so focused on the right now that they sometimes forget what they already accomplished.

The big difference between this series and Mononoke: Mononoke’s individual series had a lot of depth, but they were straightforward and standalone. Kuchuu Buranko on the other hand isn’t that deep with its individual cases, however they have overlap, they’re not straightforward at all. There are two ways in which you can watch it: just watch an episode brainlessly, and end up with a rather boring series about a bunch of depth-less people, or you could try to look behind the exterior, and try and find connections and hidden meanings. And that’s why I like this series.

Also, is it me or did that kid have a Bake Neko t-shirt?
Rating: * (Good)