Welcome to this week’s Worth Reading!
Last week I linked to a review of Kiki’s Delivery Service and pondered on why Ghibli movies were so rarely reviewed. Reader Dawnstorm however provided the simplest and most likely explanation – the anime community concentrates mostly on streaming and current season stuff. That being said, reviews of and articles on older stuff aren’t exactly uncommon.
- Truly Trash Media posts a look back at the classic Angel Beats – the second anime they saw. (Though they don’t say when that was.) It’s a fun read, because Angel Beats was also among the early shows I watched. After watching it, I told my wife “there might be something to this anime stuff” and we sat down and watched it together. There’s been few if any other shows that I’ve ever immediately re-watched. To be fair, that may be for the reason Dawnstorm gave – as one season ends, it’s time for another without much of a break.
- Frog-Kun at Fantastic Memes reposted an older column of his comparing the LN and anime versions of INVADERS of the ROKUJYOMA!?. Though mostly forgettable, it was a fun little show. There’s one scene in Ep3, a Crowning Moment of Awesome (Warning: TV Tropes link) for Yurika, that I do re-watch now and again. I just love the look of determination she gets right before her henshin sequence… Wait a moment – I’m a Magical Girl! I’ve got this!
- Frog-kun also authors a piece at Crunchyroll “Hanasaku Iroha” – The Good, The Bad, and the Kawaii. Sakura Quest (whose finale aired today) was marketed as part of a thematic trilogy with 2011’s Hanasaku and 2014’s Shirobako, which makes this article particularly timely. The article is worth reading, and the anime worth watching. In some ways, Hanasaku illustrates what Sakura could have been and fell short of.
Speaking of older anime and adaptations (we were discussing the latter last week)…
- Scott at Mechanical Anime Reviews discusses why he liked the original Kino’s Journey and his concerns over next season’s reboot.
- Last week’s Worth Reading post had an interesting conversation on adaptations down in the comments (scroll down to read them), they’re worth checking out. Feel free to add your thoughts.
Adaptations and their issues just keep coming up. I should probably just create an ‘Adaptation’ tag and be done with it!
Irina at I Drink and Watch Anime posts an interesting piece – Why I keep watching bad anime. C’mon, it’s something we’ve all done – watched a piece of complete trash coughLove&Liescough right through to the end credits. I know I have.
Reasons I’ve kept watching a bad anime: It started good, and I hoped it would return to being good… (Dimension W) It’s wasn’t that bad taken as individual episodes or arcs… (Gangsta) The pieces were there even though they failed to pull it together in the end… (Celestial Method) And of course the infamous “trainwreck you can’t take your eyes off of”… (Big Order)
Yukinocake at ShinYuu posts on Japanese Breakfasts. Very different from what I’m used to eating for certain! (Usually cereal, unless there’s leftover pizza – then pizza.) I keep meaning to talk more about food & cooking here, it’s one of my favorite topics.
As usual, hit the jump to see the ‘below-the-fold’ material. Bonsai, my favorite villians/antagonists, and a dream about ani-blogging!
Other Stuff
We spent Saturday at the Pacific Bonsai Museum. We’ve been trying to get over there all summer, but as you know, life has been crazy.
This video gives a quick overview of the museum. The big building they spend so much time on is interesting, but it’s not part of the museum, it’s the old Weyerhaeuser headquarters building. (Weyerhaeuser established the bonsai gardens that became the museum and the museum is located on the former corporate campus.)
The reason we’ve been trying to get over there is they’re currently featuring a display of bonsai created from plants native to the North America. All in all, it was very cool. I took a ton of pictures, and as soon as I get them edited I’ll make a full post.
Only one tweet exchange with senpai;notes this week… I keep forgetting to take part.
(Hmm… Didn’t realize until just now that Hanasaku appears there too. This seems to be the week of repeating things, doesn’t it?)
Who are some of your favorite villians/antagonists? Let us know down in the comments!
One final thing… Woke up from an odd ani-blogging dream yesterday morning. Me and bunch of other ani-bloggers were working on a short anime. In one scene (the climax? The finale?) the heroine turned, smiled, and stepped off a curb to cross the street… We all agreed this scene had to be just right or the whole thing was a failure. When I woke up, we had been furiously emailing sketches, notes, and storyboards back and forth in the wee hours of the morning.
The only image that sticks with me is her shining smile.
A collaborative project like that could be fun, and there’s some awfully talented people (both bloggers and commenters) in the anime blog community. Alas, it was but a dream.
Thanks for stopping by, I hope you found something in this week’s issue to be worth reading!
Apprentice Mages Lounge. 
Big Order was a modern day masterpiece! I can’t believe my computer didn’t explode as I typed that. Thank you so much for the mention – I look forward to your collaborative short!
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How can anyone sober write such a sentence… Oh, wait, now I remember your blog’s name! :) :) :)
You’re welcome!
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We read a lot of the same stuff haha. Still a few links to things I haven’t yet :) That Bonsai Museum looks really cool, since we live not too far away from each other it’s probably a place I could visit. I’ll have to look into it more.
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Well, I’m trying to find as many different sources as I can… But there’s an upper bound to how wide a net I can cast and still have time for a life. :)
It’s right off of I-5, so it’s pretty easy to get to if you’re in the Seattle area. It’s worth a stop if you’re up here.
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No worries, I have a hard time if I cast the net too wide myself.
If I ever am headed up to Washington and I have some free time I’ll definitely try and go. I know some folks who would enjoy it as well so I’ll let ’em know about it :)
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Yay, thank you for sharing.
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You’re welcome! And thanks for stopping by! Welcome to the Lounge!
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That bonsai museum looks really neat.
Best anime villains/antagonists? I’m bad with lists, and I tend not to remember villains/antagonists as villains/antagonists, so this is hard. Squealer (Shin Sekai Yori) and Kyubei (Madoka) should be up there. Shounen fighters have plenty of good antagonists; I can’t possibly remember them all. Medusa (Soul Eater) stands out, though. I find this hard.
I actually have the Shinryakusha Dvds. It’s not something I usually buy, but not much else came out around that time… Especially the early episodes hold up better than you’d think.
Also, I don’t eat breakfast. I can’t get anything down when I get up; I’m a good-morning zombie and it takes a while to wake up.
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I’ve never seen Shin Sekai Yori, but it’s actually in my Crunchyroll queue…
Given a choice, I eat my breakfast as late as possible too. I can eat early, but don’t care for it much as it takes me a while to wake up too.
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Good writeup on Angel Beats. That’s one of those shows where I always wished it was longer than 13 episodes, just because there are so many interesting characters that you hardly get to know at all.
Favorite anime villains/antagonists: I’ll go with Dilandau from Escaflowne, Fate Testarossa from Lyrical Nanoha S1, Shishio Makoto from Rurouni Kenshin, Legato Bluesummers from Trigun, and Kirei Kotomine from the Fate franchise. List subject to change tomorrow as soon as I think of someone else.
Was Shindo really an antagonist? In that series it was that smug snake Irina Avalon who really set my teeth on edge. I couldn’t wait to see her get taken down a few pegs.
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Be sure and tell the authors when I link to a good post! They’re the ones that have done all the heavy lifting after all…
Everyone is picking villains from shows I haven’t seen.
An antagonist isn’t necessarily a Bad Guy. Antagonists are someone who the character struggles against and Shindo certainly was an antagonist, especially from the point of view of your misguided choice for Best Girl. (Just kidding! We’re fated to never agree on that.) The setbacks he handed her (both directly by defeating her and indirectly by going all-out against Asuka) and her subsequent struggle, though mostly internal, defines her and her character arc. Maybe it’s my nature, which appreciates his blend of playfulness-within-seriousness, but I find that notable.
Irina OTOH is an out-and-out villain. There’s no internal struggle against her. There’s no satisfactory end game other than clearly defeating her.
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Problem is most of the shows you and I have in common are either shows with abstract/faceless antagonists like KanColle’s abyssals, or shows like Koufuku Graffiti with no antagonist at all. For that subset of shows I know we’ve both watched, I liked Sagami from When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, Asuka’s mom from Euphonium, and Kanade for the brief time she fills the antagonist role in Angel Beats (though I don’t really consider her a proper antagonist, which is why I didn’t list her before). That’s about the best I can come up with, though.
Nope, I will never understand what you see in the Flying Fish! ;) But point taken. I never really thought of Shindo as an antagonist in the sense that he never did anything unlikeable, and of course got his clock thoroughly cleaned by the main antagonists of the series. I can’t argue that he does serve as an antagonist for Misaki specifically, though.
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Thinking on my reply to you, I think I’m going take what I said above and expand it into a feature post explaining my overall thinking. I’ve been busy and gotten out of the habit of writing features…
What do I see in the Flying Fish? Someone who really doesn’t care if they win or lose, they’re in it just for the sheer joy of playing. I like that kind of devil-may-care attitude.
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