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anime reviews
this page contains a compilation of my anime reviews. it is compiled from my myanimelist. reviews are sorted by rating, then alphabetically within ratings.
many of the factors impacting my reviews are largely external to the shows themselves. all are excellent in their own right, but the best are often colored by the when and where they found me.
10/10
excellent shows that are at once deeply thought provoking, personal, and culturally foundational.
- Akira
- Cowboy Bebop
- Horimiya
- Jin-Rou
- Memories
- Pale Cocoon
- Perfect Blue
- Ping Pong the Animation
- Redline
- Serial Experiments Lain
- Shinseiki Evangelion
- Shinseiki Evangelion Movie: Air/Magokoro wo, Kimi ni
- Sonny Boy
- Sousou no Frieren
- Steins;Gate
9/10
amazing, even flawless shows, which nonetheless lack that special spark that would otherwise make them masterpieces.
- Bakemonogatari
- Bocchi the Rock!
- Byousoku 5 Centimeter
- Death Note
- Hotaru no Haka
- Houseki no Kuni
- Howl no Ugoku Shiro
- Katanagatari
- Kimi no Na wa.
- Kiseijuu: Sei no Kakuritsu
- Kizumonogatari III: Reiketsu-hen
- Majo no Takkyuubin
- Mushishi
- Mushoku Tensei: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu
- Mushoku Tensei: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu Part 2
- Nichijou
- Ookami to Koushinryou
- Ousama Ranking
- Owarimonogatari 2nd Season
- Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
- Shingeki no Kyojin Season 3 Part 2
- Shingeki no Kyojin: The Final Season - Kanketsu-hen
- Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru
- Vinland Saga
- Vinland Saga Season 2
Horimiya
My all time favorite comfort media.
Years ago, back when I was a bit more prone to bouts of weekend depression, I remember telling friends: “If you hear anything about me re-watching/reading Horimiya, it’s a call for help.”
And though I no longer watch it as often anymore (both because I’m in a much better place mentally now, thanks for asking; and because it got to the point where I started memorizing whole episodes line by line), Horimiya still holds strong in my mind as one of the best oiled pieces of story telling machinery ever put to animation.
Pale Cocoon
There’s a definition of the word ‘creative’ that I heard a long time ago that I really liked. It went something like
When faced with a new idea, an uncreative person (who is otherwise perfectly intelligent), will come out with just as many ideas as they are told.
A normal person might bump this up to 2 — equivalent exchange. They can extend an idea, but the sum number of novel ideas in the world remains roughly the same.
For a creative, this number is 10 fold. Leave a creative a tiny little interesting breadcrumb, and they’ll retort back with new, interesting ideas so fast that you can hardly believe they hadn’t heard the thing before.
Certain works have the power to make me feel like a creative. Pale Cocoon is one such case. For 20 minutes, every second, and every scene, and every piece of technology and skyline and faded photograph and facial expression and fragment of history, tastes, like how I imagine, one of those creative breadcrumbs tastes.
Sonny Boy
I didn’t really enjoy watching Sonny Boy.
I get that that might sound weird seeing the 10 right next to this review, but hear me out.
Sonny Boy is a show that’s good only after you watch it.
There’s a decent number of shows that I remember fondly for nostaligic reasons — Gurren Lagann, Steins;Gate, FLCL, etc. These shows are obviously good, but my liking of them are biased, both because of the personal impact they had at the time, and how my life has colored their memory in the years since I’ve watched them.
And I rewatch these shows, I’m almost always disappointed. They never live up to how good they are in my memories. The hue just isn’t right. In some sense, what made these shows good wasn’t their actual text, but my memories of them. Of course, the shows didn’t become an instant 0 or whatever upon rewatch, but that brings me to my point:
Sonny Boy is a show exclusively made of memories.
When I graduated high school, I felt this a void well up inside me where I thought an emotion should have been.
“Shouldn’t I be a bit more proud? Or accomplished? Or something?”
Finishing Sonny Boy felt like much the same. Everything about the show felt like it was one of the greats. Yet when credits rolled, I didn’t really feel much of anything.
Some time after I finished Sonny Boy, out of nowhere, I suddenly remembered the date of my graduation.
My parents didn’t show up that day, busy with work, what not. I didn’t mind. I picked my graduation certificate, listened to a droning speech by the principal, and went about the rest of my day without much of a thought.
But I knew something significant had happened, I just hadn’t felt it yet.
In the years to come, as old friends and memories drifted, reuinted, then drifted again, I slowly pieced together what that feeling was supposed to be.
Sonny Boy was the first piece of media to make me feel exactly like that brewing feeling I have about graduation. It gave me a new piece of emotional vocabulary I could call back on, and touch, and talk about — like I’m doing right now.
Bakemonogatari
I’ve watched Bakemonogatari three times.
Once, as a young teenager, on the recommendation of my older brother. I got the impression that it was a very weird show by very weird Japanese people whose editing style made me press the pause button a whole ton to catch all of the text dumps.
Twice, as a college freshman, revisiting the whole Monogatari series as a literary work after reading a ton of essays. I found the themes of dealing with mental illness quite intruiging. The weird editing and characters had also grown on me in the mean time. It was then that I realized that the Monogatari series was one that definitely got better on rewatches. After this second rewatch, I promised myself that I would learn Japanese for the sole purpose of one day properly watching Bakemonogatari.
Then thrice, finally, with subtitles off, a month after college graduation. This time around, I found Bakemonogatari to be an incredibly endearing love story. This became even more poignant as episode 12 came along, and supercell’s kimi no shiranai monogatari started blasting; I realized that the lyrics were actually telling the story as a love letter, from Senjougahara’s point of view. I was love struck before, and I fell in love with the series all over again at that moment.
Byousoku 5 Centimeter
Perfectly bittersweet.
The art is just utterly gorgeous. The airial shots of Japanese cities at night look like Shinkai just ripped them straight out of my memory.
The first part by itself is an easy 10/10, though the writing and presentation falls off a little bit for the second and third parts. As a whole, I’d say the piece sits comfortably at a nine-ish.
Part of it is that I’m not really sure how a space ship, or surfing, or much of the rest of it fit together with the main thread of Takeki, Akari and Kanae’s awkward little injective romance. They definitely made for some good imagery, so who cares right?
This is Makoto Shinkai’s best work in my eyes, even though I’d say I enjoyed watching Your Name more overall.
Katanagatari
Katanagatari is, in many ways, Nishio Isshin-lite.
The story is much more straight forward, the characters a lot more transparent, and the themes a lot more pronounced. The story is about collecting 12 swords. The title, 刀語(katana gatari), literally just means ‘sword-story.’
It’s so straightfoward that maybe it’s honestly a more interesting work meta-contextually than it is textually. Much of the fun comes from it playing with your expectations, then slyly making fun of you for having been played, and then you playing along anyway because WHO spoils a major plot beat out of nowhere like 5 times, then has the absolute gall and confidence to still make the spoiled episode just as good anyway.
Fun on first watch, and I suspect it’ll be just as fun on rewatch.