Tag: MagiReco

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [9/26/21]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture. Expect some degree of spoilers for the covered shows.

Hello, anime fans! You may have noticed the site looking a little different this past week. I got a new WordPress theme which comes with a somewhat spiffier look and more general readability. Sadly switching themes does seem to have made the archives a bit of a pain to browse and there’s not really anything I can do about it until I can eventually afford a WordPress Premium plan and implement some custom CSS. I’m going to try to work on a workaround at some point in the future, but in the meantime, I beg your patience.

All that in mind, I do strongly urge you to take a gander at this article’s footer and consider pledging some support. It really does help me continue writing in a very real and tangible way.

Administrative notes aside, we’ve got a bit of an interesting bit of zeitgeist in the air this week. Four of the five anime covered here are about an all-female cast pushing through some obstacle(s) or another. For the girls of Magia Record this triumph is shadowed with equal parts tragedy, but nonetheless, it remains compelling. For the most part at least, it seems the girls are alright.

Blue Reflection Ray

This is among the first anime to actually end since I started doing this column. I’ve already written about the series at length in my review of it and I’ve no desire to repeat myself too much. So let me just say, Blue Reflection Ray is that rare anime that just kind of clicks with you if you’re the right sort of person. It has its flaws, sure, but I wouldn’t trade the series for the world and I’m very happy with how it ended. I may simply be a straight-up sucker for magical girl anime. But my view that there is always room for these stories of girls triumphing over the evils of the world remains unchanged. Blue Reflection Ray was not the best to ever do it, it wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is a valid, meaningful part of that artistic lineage, and no one can take that away from it.

The Detective is Already Dead

Another recently-concluded show. Boy, Detective was….something, wasn’t it? I think after the dust settles and it recedes into memory, the few people who remember Detective at all will remember it more as a sometimes-compelling trainwreck more than anything genuinely awful. I don’t mean to come across as elitist about this, but I think anyone saying it’s truly terrible hasn’t seen any truly terrible anime. (Not that I blame them, of course.)

But it certainly wasn’t particularly good either, and I can’t picture it picking up even the ironic cult following of something like Big Order. Such is the curse of being rough going but not outright bad enough to watch “as a joke”.

That said, as I mentioned in my review of the series, I do think all of that gives it a kind of charm if you’re a pretty specific sort of person. But most people aren’t that sort of person, of course. So into the dustbin of history it will inevitably end up. What a tragic fate for our heroic detective! But so it goes. So it goes.

Kageki Shoujo!!

I stand by what I said last week, and what do you know, Kageki Shoujo!! stuck the landing. I’m still not sure I’d put it in my personal upper echelon of anime from 2021 (you’ll have to wait for my year-end rankings to find out for sure), but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. That’s worth quite a lot all on its own.

The finale this week succeeds in my mind largely because of two things. One; it finally gives us, however briefly, a Sarasa performance that’s truly her own. Her take on Romeo & Juliet‘s Tybalt here is a wonderful thing to behold, and watching the audience (which, mind you, is just her own classmates) dance in the palm of her hand as she wrings the dark, moody character for all he’s worth is just excellent. Two; it ties up some other loose ends, in particular with respect to the hitherto slightly underdeveloped Sawa Sugimoto. Her own frustration at not getting that very same role comes through just as clear as Sarasa’s triumphs, and how she deals with that disappointment ends the show on a realistic, but still high, note.

Inevitably, some will be a bit cold on the choice of stopping point. (We don’t even get to actually see any of our girls act in a proper play, after all.) And the faint hope of a second season remains in the air. But I think that so many people care so much about Kageki Shoujo!! in the first place speaks a lot to its strengths. No one really expected much of this series, but it ended up captivating the crowd anyway. Isn’t that sort of surprise what following seasonal anime at all is all about?

It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to feel “proud of” a show, but nonetheless that’s where I find myself at with Kageki Shoujo!! When the season started I was fairly sure it would be written off by most due to sharing some vaguely similar subject matter and a very similar name with Revue Starlight. That it’s managed to comfortably find and secure its own audience, even over here in “the West”, is a lovely thing. I’ve rarely been happier to be proven wrong.

Magia Record

Magia Record‘s second season is over, though not without some amount of tumult, coming as it does after a week of delays and with a number of technical issues.

As with before, most of my thoughts are over on Geek Girl Authority. Though with an asterisk, this time.

This is the last article I’m going to be writing for them. My current plan is to fully focus my efforts over here on Magic Planet Anime. So, if you could give it a look, that’d mean a lot to me. The people at GGA have been great to me in the, gosh, two years I’ve written for the site, and I’m happy to part with them on the best terms possible.

As for the episode itself? Honestly it’s a real treat to have Mami survive a season of anything Madoka-related alive and unhurt. Everything else, probably deliberately, remains up in the air right now. I’m definitely quite invested in the fate of Kuroe, in particular. Her disappearance here raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Tropical Rouge Precure

I don’t write about Tropical Rouge Precure, or really Precure in general, much in this column, both because its air-day, fairly late on a Saturday night here in the States, makes it hard to talk about the “current” episode and because, being a year-round show with four full cours, it doesn’t change that much from week to week. Most of the time, that is.

But every once in a while Precure will deliver an absolute knockout, and that’s episode 29 (“Reviving A Legend! The Pretty Cure’s Power-Up Makeover!“) for Tropical Rouge. Easily the best-looking episode of the show so far (and one of the best of the year period, up there with Magia Record season 2’s debut episode among others), it introduces some half dozen new plot points without making anything feel congested or convoluted and looks amazing while it does it. It’s the rare anime episode that feels twice its length in a decidedly positive way. Expect this one to come up in conversations even years from now. Episode 30 has since aired too, and it’s also good, but 29 has to remain the star here, an all-timer if there ever was one.

Elsewhere on MPA

I linked them already, but seriously, do check out my reviews of The Detective is Already Dead and Blue Reflection Ray if you have the time. I’m quite proud of how the both of them turned out.

Lastly, it’s yet to fully come to fruition, but I can say with relative confidence that a new episode of KeyFrames Forgotten is on the way. I’m not entirely sure when it will arrive, but the wheels are in motion, you have my word of that much.

Until next week, anime fans.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [9/5/21]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.

Hello folks, it’s been another breezy week here at Magic Planet Anime. I hope these three writeups will sate your curiosity for the next seven (ish) days.

Blue Reflection Ray – As it enters its final act, I am half-convinced that myself and a friend (hi Luna!) are the only two people on Earth still watching Blue Reflection Ray. Nonetheless, for anyone else still out there who’s on this strange journey with us, wasn’t this week’s episode just incredible? The reintroduction of Momo, one of the show’s best characters, signals the beginning of the end for BRR’s plot, and the dark, vine-covered city that bringing the Commons into reality has created is the embodiment of the emotional deadening the show stands against. But in spite of that, the episode is all fluff in the best way possible, hatchets are buried and relationships are rekindled. The shot of the Reflectors, now all on the same side sans Uta and Shino herself, is one of my favorite moments of the entire season. We’ve followed these girls a very long way from home, and I cannot wait to see where they finally end up.

Magia Record – As usual, my detailed thoughts are over on GGA. This week’s episode was visually jankier than usual, probably the result of SHAFT’s famous production troubles. It manages to be compelling, anyway. And honestly that shot up there of Iroha and Yachiyo hugging as they reunite would make almost any episode well worth it. As a side note, MagiReco also picks up a “one-liner of the year” award here, for Yachiyo’s just genuinely funny as hell comment here:

Whoever came up with that deserves a medal. All told, despite its issues it’s still a very strong episode from a very strong show.

Sonny Boy – The main problem with Sonny Boy is that it’s so obviously compelling that talking about why can feel routine, or worse, dogmatic. But there really is a soul under all the surreal imagery. This week’s episode, “Laughing Dog”, explored the past of Yamabiko, the boy turned canine. In it, Sonny Boy lays out a million and one different ways people can be trapped; by their relationships, by their past, and by failing to move on from either. The series has a reputation for being opaque, and this episode won’t change that, but it is one of the rare anime episodes where a single line of dialogue seems to leap out the screen and slap us, the audience, across the face.

There’s a bitter tinge of futility here, too. The idea that one can no more truly leave their regrets behind them than a dog can swear a pinkie promise. But maybe that’s just another layer to the metaphor. Worlds hang in the balance, and four weeks remain.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [8/29/21]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.

Folks, I’ll keep it straight and simple with you. I’ve been showing my family around Chicago for much of the past week and I have been deeply tired. As such I’m not caught up on my seasonals, so the writing here is, for the most part, going to be a bit dated. But hey, you work with what you have.

I’m planning to do a catch-up marathon starting this very evening. So hopefully next week I’ll have some more relevant material for you. Until then, enjoy what I’ve got penned so far.

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Kageki Shoujo – Sarasa’s story has begun tying into a larger dualistic theme of artistic tradition and innovation; how they conflict and otherwise interact. I’ve given Kageki Shoujo some guff in the past for focusing too much on male side characters. To some extent I still kind of think it does, but as the nature of the story has branched out to become as much about the systems that shape those who pour their hearts into their art as it is about any individual person, it feels more earned.

Episode eight, in particular, paints a quietly illuminating portrait of what, exactly, one has to give up in pursuit of dreams this grandiose. Centering around secondary character Kaoru and her brief, bygone romance with a bench-warmer from her high school’s baseball team, it both draws and explicitly denies parallels between the two. Kaoru wants nothing more than to become an actress and live up to her family’s legacy, her would-be boyfriend cannot stand the pressure that the constant comparisons to his literally professional-level older brother produces. The two bond over this half-commonality and are eventually driven apart by it. In the end, they pursue their dreams, but at the cost of each other. The episode ends, though, on a hopeful note, and a promise that this might all circle back around someday. It’s an optimistic, even romantic notion for a show that’s generally as grounded as Kageki Shoujo is.

Sonny Boy – New worlds, evil teachers who are students in disguise, movies that change reality, talking dogs, pariahs, and visions from the heavens. Halfway through its run, Sonny Boy is as wonderfully weird and cryptic as ever. Episode six was the end of a certain version of this drifting classroom’s story, but not the one we’re following. For this treasure box of puzzles and surreal imagery, we can only anticipate what’s to come.

Cut joke from my GGA writeup for this week: “I’m here to kick ass and eat peach cobbler, and I’m almost done with all this peach cobbler.”

Magia Record – As always, my more detailed thoughts are available over on GGA for this series. We must ask ourselves though; is Magia Record the best thing currently airing? This week’s episode and its feat of turning the previously ignorable Kuroe of all people into a character-of-the-week is a sign that points to “yes”. Honestly, what competition does it have? Sonny Boy? That show is great, certainly, but it lacks MagiReco’s series credentials and consequently the sense that we’re seeing something big happen. The real thinker is just whether the remainder of season 2, and the upcoming season 3, are enough to change the question we’re asking into “is Magia Record the best anime of 2021?”.

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As a final note; you’ve probably already read it, but if not, do be sure to check out my review of the final Rebuild of Evangelion film. I really loved the movie and I think it may, in fact, be my favorite ending for the series.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Reviews

Ranking Every 2020 Anime (That I Actually Finished), From Worst to Best – Part 2

The middle parts of a list are always the weirdest ones to figure out. Not hardest, that’s the very top, but the weirdest, definitely. Because you end up asking yourself to compare shows that are incredibly dissimilar and that you like about equally. By the way; if you’re new here, you’ll want to check out the Introduction first, and read Part 1 before hitting this up.

Frankly, every entry on this part of the list could probably be freely swapped with each other and I’d have very few complaints. Still, all of these anime are ones that I think did more right than wrong and in some cases I think they did a few specific things very well. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

#14: Wave, Listen To Me!

Whatever else you may say about it, never accuse Wave, Listen To Me! of following trends. Very briefly, Wave is about a loud-mouthed restaurant worker who ends up getting her own graveyard-shift radio show hosting gig at the local station. Without a doubt, it’s one of the more singular premises of the year.

Does it live up to the potential in that premise? Well, yes and no. Like its seasonal contemporary Gleipnir, Wave has a tendency to get in its own way. When the series allows Minare, our heroine, to do her job and let loose with the full force of her personality in the radio booth, it’s amazing. Lead voice actress Riho Sugiyama is as important to Wave‘s general composition as anyone else, and with an actress less capable of fully embodying Minare’s spirit the show would fall apart.

So it’s rather frustrating that it sometimes does anyway. Much of Wave is about Minare’s off-air life. Sometimes these stories work and sometimes they don’t, generally following the pattern that whenever Minare feels like the butt of a joke, they’re not very good. Making things worse is an abundance of off-color-in-a-bad-way humor, most notably about a half-dozen gay jokes that feel woefully forced. Wave is perhaps the anime from 2020 that I’m the most internally divided on. Its highs are high, its lows are low. It ends on a pretty good note, and I’m hoping against hope for a followup. I’d like to see Minare given the opportunity to do more.

#13: BRAND NEW ANIMAL

This was the first of several anime on this list where I had the visceral reaction of “wait, that aired this year?” But yes, this Yoh Yoshinari-directed, Kazuki Nakashima-written synthwave-colored furry urban fantasy series was a product of 2020. BRAND NEW ANIMAL occupies a weird place on this list, in the wider cultural zeitgeist, and for me personally. I actually really quite liked this show, so why isn’t it higher on the list?

Well, to a point, most of Nakashima’s anime scripts are….well, “similar” would be the generous way of putting it. Most of his scripts center around ideological conflicts between the individualistic and the communal and tend to end with both sides coming together to fight a common foe. That last bit has often (and not incorrectly) been flagged as a weakness, with his scripts’ formulaic story beats, and a corresponding lack of nuance, as the other main problem. These are fair criticisms, but I’d argue that what Nakashima’s writing lacks in its ability to propose solutions the world’s problems more specific than “come together”, it makes up for in its faith that we, in fact, can come together.

But of course Nakashima is a scriptwriter and an anime’s script is nothing without, well, the anime. Yoshinari and his team turn in an aesthetic feast with BRAND NEW ANIMAL. I mentioned synthwave earlier, but the blue and pink shadows often do bring that specific subgenre to mind. The fluid, popping animation that defines the best parts of the TRIGGER back-catalog and, because of the distinctly fuzzy cast, a wonderful array of animal-person designs are present too, they really tie the whole thing together.

Ultimately I suppose my main issue with BRAND NEW ANIMAL is simply that it isn’t either a bit longer or a bit more focused. For how clumsy it occasionally is, BNA does sometimes step into surprisingly sharp social commentary (“Dolphin Daydream”‘s jabs at fairweather allies and the harm they cause sticks out most clearly to me), but just as often its swings go wide. It’s an uneven experience, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it the whole way through and would instantly hop on any further material in the show’s universe.

In lieu of that….maybe greenlight two cours next time? Please?

#12: Dorohedoro

You know what I’ve always thought was an underrated quality? Knowing exactly what you want to do and just doing it. That’s about how I’d describe Dorohedoro, an adaption of Q. Hayashida‘s long-running bizarro seinen. It’s one of the better things Netflix has thrown money at in 2020 (other highlights include listfellow BRAND NEW ANIMAL and The Great Pretender, which is only not here because I haven’t watched the final arc), but much more importantly it’s a really good piece of genre fiction in a genre that doesn’t get a lot of rep in mainstream TV anime.

And that genre is….weird splatterpunk grungy fantasy I guess? If Dorohedoro feels hard to put in a box it’s only because seinen anime are fairly rare. But there’s still definitely something unique about a series whose main selling point is that it’s the adventures of a big lizard-headed guy on a quest to find out who turned him into a big lizard-headed guy, and his companion, an equally-buff woman who’s also a master gyoza chef.

Dorohedoro cruises by on its stylish ultraviolence, colorful cast, and its truly weird setting. The only real reason it’s not higher up on the list is that the manga is even stranger and the anime adapts only a pretty small part of it. Dorohedoro is an anime with basically no problems, but its strengths only go so far. It’s definitely worth checking out, but make sure you hit up the source material at some point, too.

#11: Princess Connect! Re:Dive

Breaking news: local action-comedy-fantasy isekai Princess Connect! Re:Dive makes the rest of those obsolete; KonoSuba found weeping in a trashed hotel room. OK, that’s a wild exaggeration, but you have to give it up for something as unassuming as PriConne managing to do so much with so little. This is a series in which the main character is effectively mute, and he still has more personality than your average Protagonist-kun.

I don’t think anyone would deign to call PriConne laser-focused, exactly, but the unifying element, weirdly enough, is cooking. Female lead and secret actual protagonist Princess Pecorine’s food obsession provides a tie-line through the series. It’s more than just comedic (though it’s certainly that, too), as the comfort of a shared meal comes to represent the family ties that Pecorine has lost. The other two primary protagonists have their own things going on, with Karyl’s secret double-agent status being the runner up as far as which is most interesting.

Did I mention this thing looks great, too? That’s not always a given for seasonals, although mobage adaptions seem to have slightly better luck than most. Princess Connect! Re:Dive features some of the most purely flashy animation of the entire year. Something that is downright impressive for a series that really did kinda seem to come from nowhere.

Honestly the only reason it isn’t even higher on the list is because of its fairly limited ambitions, which is really only a flaw in the most abstract sense. And with a second season on the way that seems poised to put focus on the dimension-spanning plot that lurks in PriConne’s background, it may not remain a criticism that’s true for very long. Don’t be surprised if this thing’s second season ends up a good five or ten places higher next year.

#10: Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Gaiden

Yeah, this is another one that feels like it aired a lifetime ago.

Magia Record is a curious thing that seems like it was made for nobody. But I actually think, in this odd little anime’s case, that that’s not just a positive, but most of the reason it’s good. Magia Record is a spinoff / possibly-a-sequel-it’s-kind-of-hard-to-say of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, one of the most important, widely acclaimed, and successful anime of the 2010s. To say it has big shoes to fill would be a massive understatement. Indeed, MagiReco entered to no small amount of skepticism. Being a spinoff of a spinoff (it’s based on a mobile game), a lot of folks were of the opinion that the series was little more than a soulless, hollow cash-grab. But if Magia Record is a cash grab, it’s a fucking weird one.

In fairly sharp contrast to its illustrious predecessor, Magia Record explores some four or five largely unrelated miniature arcs over the course of its run. (Almost all of which concern various supernatural rumors. Something the series seems to have inherited from a different SHAFT property; Bakemonogatari.) This structure is deeply interesting to me, because it seems to me that Magia Record is of the opinion that Madoka Magica’s intangibles; its themes, aesthetics, the way it explores its parent genre, and so on have been so thoroughly strip-mined by other anime that engaging with them is no longer a goal it wants to pursue. Instead, Magia Record seems to treat itself first and foremost as a vehicle for expanding the pure text of the Madoka series. It’s a book of “Madoka stories” before it’s anything else.

When familiar elements do show up, the context is altered, strange, and unfamiliar. Not unlike what the original Madoka did with many trappings of the magical warrior subgenre in the first place. The original Puella Magi are the most obvious example; Mami reappears, but as a villain. Kyoko dips in and out of the show’s narrative, and is markedly absent for the finale. Sayaka is only present for the finale. Madoka herself appears only in a brief flashback. Homura is not even mentioned; a ghost among ghosts.

So those “Madoka stories”, where Magia Record seems most like a “normal” magical girl series, become the show’s lifeblood. They definitely have their ups and downs, and the best of the lot are front-loaded. (Rena’s arc, an examination of a truly deep-seated self-loathing, might be the overall peak of the series.) But that it is so disconnected from what the fanbase in general “wants” from a Madoka series is absolutely fascinating to me, and I like it for that reason. This interpretation of MagiReco is controversial (I have seen many who simply read its structure as inept), but I stand by it. A second season is in the wings that promises a return to a broader, overarching narrative. More than any other anime on this list, I have absolutely no idea what to expect from MagiReco, and I love it for that.

And that’s humble Part 2. Tomorrow we get into the top ten, uh, nine, so I’ll see you then for Part 3.

If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.