Everyone bow to your new rap queen. This winter season has ended up being quite good to me. Not that my watchlist is bursting at the seams, but my barrier for a good season is more than 2 anime...
Everyone bow to your new rap queen.
This winter season has ended up being quite good to me. Not that my watchlist is bursting at the seams, but my barrier for a good season is more than 2 anime I am very excited to watch more of. This season has at least 3, maybe 4 or 5. And I’m gonna write about them and you are going to read it because that’s the contract you signed when you started reading this post.
The Promised Neverland
Between Promised Neverland and anime like Death Note (or Hunter X Hunter, if that’s more your jam), I’ve realized Shounen Jump is at its best with horror thriller series. The setup for Promised Neverland is instantly interesting, creating a cross between The Great Escape and Lord of the Flies. There’s a great build up of tension as best laid plans are built and rebuilt as new information comes to light, and the cycle of trust and deceit helps ramp that tension while the ultimate horrors sit under the whole premise.
It’s really well made too, albeit for the kind of adaptation I want from it would make fans who demand it adapts everything from the manga furious. Namely that I do not care what the adults in the series do. I don’t care about their characters and motivations. Our lack of understanding in why the world is in this state adds to the horror of the situation and heightens the solitude of the main characters. I resent the scenes with Krone warbling away her hopes and dreams because this is not her story and detracts from the core story we are trying to tell with the kids. Asides from that, and the fact sometimes I want to say “shut up Norman you’re fucking 12”, it’s a really great anime.
Kaguya-sama: Love is War
The anime I accidentally deleted the section from my season preview for so now I can’t point to it and say “I told you so” for when it turned out to be amazing. This the director who did Rakugo Shinjuu and somehow turned dross like Sankarea into something watchable. Except it’s more likely I just wrote “should be decent” in the season preview, because even knowing I liked this director a lot, I have been shocked by just how much I really love this show. It has honestly put every other highschool romcom to shame and made me realise this genre can be done incredibly well when handled by a talented team.
The writing is reasonably funny and so on, but it really is the directing that sells it. The dramatic swoops of the camera, the careful pauses to heighten awkwardness or tension, the use of shadows and framing. It knows how to build that suspense and shatter it for humorous effect. The studio are clearly having the time of their lives with it too, as shown by that one ED with the most carefully detailed dance sequence in anime history. I can get how you would be wary of these kinds of anime by now, so let me assure you that This Is The One You Should Watch. Scamp seal of approval and all that.
Mob Psycho 200
(I know this isn’t the name but it should be)
It took a few episodes to get rolling (as did the first season) but now that Mob Psycho is in its groove I’ve remembered why it is I like this show so much. Yeah part of it is that it’s the most visually interesting TV anime of the entire decade, but there’s also…actually let’s take a step back and say really, I do think it is the most visually interesting anime of the decade. What beats it? I’m a big fan of the Shaft aesthetic but even at their peak, Monogatari, Madoka nor March beat Mob Psycho at its own game. Land of the Lustrous was a wild success in proving what CG anime can be and Jojo’s does some wild shit, but neither of them are as consistently incredible as Mob Psycho. Little Witch Academia, One Punch Man, Tanya the Evil and Made in Abyss are all wonderfully animated and successfully execute on a style. But none of them come close to the breadth of what Mob Psycho attempts and pulls off.
Visuals aside though, a big part of the reason why I love Mob Psycho is its themes. I have a problem when in anime some childhood friend goes “oh Sousuke Bosuke, you haven’t changed a bit”, or when all relationships and path in life are decided for the main character from a young age, as though you can never escape that person you were when you were younger. Mob Psycho feels like a rejection of that. You do not have to draw your strength from what you already have, and it is valid for you to want and strive to be something different. Mob has these incredible powers, but it’s the social skills and self-confidence of others that he envies. It’s why he joins the bodybuilder club and their image of positive masculinity that he wants for himself, and the show is saying that is OK to want that, and doing so will make you better as a person. It’s wonderfully woven into the challenges Mob faces and is what is at the centre of the story that truly drives it. Mob could be a god, but he wants to be mentally and emotionally strong, and the show is behind him on that quest.
Dororo
There’s a trend when it comes to older anime and manga, or indeed older cartoons in general, that you can’t have a story about adults without including one bratty kid to hang out with them. Because otherwise the kids wouldn’t be able to connect with the story I believe was the reasoning, but I don’t think I buy that since kids usually just looked up and wanted to be the cool adults and nobody wanted the action figures of the dumb kids. Newer properties based off older manga, or even just inspired by older series, will have these kids occasionally, such as Megalobox from last year, and they almost always feel superfluous to the story and just get in the way. Imagine if Mushishi felt the need to have some kid follow Ginko around?
Now is the point where I pull the rug from under you feet and say I am OK with the kid in Dororo. Mostly because the main character is a blind deaf mute and it would be challenging to tell a story only following him around. But also because this world is so unbearably grim at times that having some genki kid around prevents it from wallowing too much. I like me a bit of grimdark, don’t get me wrong. But the world of Dororo feels like there never could be any alternative. I like my Madokas and Made in Abyss series, but those worlds are not all misery. They just uncover it throughout the story, which is why it’s interesting. Even something like Berserk where the world is grim, you are very quickly introduced to a path where the world can be one of hope and drives the story from then on. If the hope is just “boy I hope I can get my internal organs back one day”, the overwhelming grimness gets to you at some point.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
In one episode the main character solved a problem by turning his own hand into a piranha. That was rad.