One big catch though. Everybody above the bottom of the barrel “no-stars” students get special suits that enhance their innate abilities, making upward movement nearly impossible. At the top of this hierarchy is Satsuki Kiryuin, who runs the student council and rules with an iron fist. This all gets torn upside down though when Ryuko Matoi transfers into the school, wielding a scissor blade and looking for information about who murdered her eccentric scientist father.

Kill La Kill sounds like a pretty normal mystery & revenge tale (at least by anime standards), but it adds in lot of crazy but fun elements that rise it a notch above the cookie cutter anime. It has slutty outfits but for both guys and girls and constantly pokes fun at them. There’s an organist literally called “Nudist Beach” which seems to have a weird tendency to get undressed while speaking exposition (or at least Ryuko’s homeroom teacher, who is a member). And there’s the absurdity of this all happening in the confines of the school. In Kill La Kill, nearly all the fights only happen inside the school and they are pretty insane. But nobody tracks down and fights anybody outside of the school. And they do acknowledge how absurd that is on occasion.

Kill La Kill is just a really fun series. I enjoyed the characters and the battles with crazy animation, Even the filler episodes are pretty fun. Highly recommended.

Final Rating: 5/5 Slutty blood-sucking outfits

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Welcome to animation quick look, you know the drill. In short Fate/Zero is Dragonball Z, but extremely fucked up. Before I get to that, let me lay down the basics.

Centuries ago, powerful wizard families created a powerful artifact that granted wises called “the holy grail”, the problem was, it only granted one wish to one person, so of course the families went to war over it (they couldn’t just wish for infinite wishes? It’s not a genie). Why is the series called Fate/Zero? I have no clue.

This eventually leads to what is known as the “holy grail wars”. Seven mages chosen by the grail summon the spirits of ancient legendary heroes such as King Arthur and Gilgamesh to do battle. There have been 3 so far, with no winner (I don’t really understand how there has no winner, you basically use the spirits like Pokemon, last one standing wins). We come in during the fourth one, where goddammit there will finally be a winner.

Now let me explained how fucked up Fate/Zero is. One of the mages is a child murderer. You see him doing things like crucifiying children and having a grand old time of it. His spirit, simply named “Caster” is a like-minded psychopath, which of course only makes things worse. This is after seeing a scene where some old dude convinces a mage to fight for him because otherwise he’s going to continue subjecting a little girl to lying naked in a room and having giant bugs crawl all over her every night. He’s not merely threatening to do this, he’s already doing it, he’s merely telling the mage he’ll stop doing it if the mage wins the grail war for him. The I laughed very inappropriately at the little girl being excited later about one night not having to sleep naked with the bugs because it was just so goddamned absurd.

But hey at least the child murderer is something relatively interesting. Fate/Zero is mostly filled with boring stock one-dimensional characters like Rider, who is your usual “I FIGHT EVERYTHING BECAUSE THAT’S MANLY” type. Or Saber who is your normal chivalrous type but with a twist-see she’s King Arthur! It’s not really clear whether they were implying Arthur was actually a woman all along or he just happened to be re-incarnated as woman for this war. Doesn’t matter though, they do nothing interesting with that.

Pretty much the only high compliment I can pay to Fate/Zero is that the animation is pretty top notch. The character designs are pretty cool (which makes the boring personalities all the more disappointing) and the battles are slick and fun to watch. But like many anime series that promise lots of epic battling, Fate/Zero spends a whole lot of time building up to said battles and it’s just not worth dredging through the exposition.

Final Rating: 2/5-Naked girls covered in bugs.

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Welcome to animation quick look, where I watch smart satire, serious drama or just something plain weird as long as it’s animated, and tell you if it’s worth checking out.

Animation and Superhero satire are no strangers to each other. The Incredibles is probably the most well-known example of this but you also have shows like The Tick, where the hero and villains are incredibly silly. Tiger & Bunny deals more with the idea that being a Superhero is in fact a job, one bolstered by corporate sponsorships and a hit reality TV show. What does that mean? That means sometimes you drag out the drama by 30 seconds for a commercial break(even if there is imminent danger). It also means to make sure you always say your corny ass catchphrases for the camera, possibly while sporting the latest energy drink. It also generally means your costume is plastered with company logos.

Some are definitely in it for the recognition and fame and money, but Wild Tiger is a hero through and through. He cares more about saving people than pausing for camera angles. But he’s also reckless, constantly causing tons of property damage and he’s old news, being in the business for over a decade. In comes Barnaby Brooks Jr, a hot new young hero who has the exact same powers as Tiger and is much more willing to do things the way the sponsors want (but also tries to have a plan rather than just rushing in headfirst). Clearly Tiger feels like Barnaby is trying to replace him, and it only gets worse when he gets a new head sponsor insists that not only they team up, but that Tiger, the veteran, is just the sidekick. Clearly Tiger is fucking pissed, and derogatorily refers to Barnaby as “Bunny” because his outfit has “bunny ears” and he “hops around a lot”.

As you can see from the description, if you are looking for good biting superhero satire, Tiger & Bunny pretty much hits all the right notes. There a lot of great moments such as in the first episode where Tiger is trying to stop a train from derailing and is in fact told by the reality show’s producer to wait til they get through a commercial break because it’ll be “more dramatic” and they’ll get more footage on camera. There’s a point system based on rescues, captures, etc. and the various heroes are always obsessing about it. Lots of funny visuals as well. Like when the heroes are attending a party, but keep their identities secret at all times, so they are still wearing ridiculous masks and helmets but also tuxedos. It’s just a very smart comedy with interesting characters without being ridiculously wacky and over the top, which is kind of a rare feat for anime. I watched the first four episodes and had a really fun time with it, and will probably finish the whole thing soon (though damn you Hulu, you advertised the series in English and only the first four are. I hate switching from one to the other. The different voices take a lot of getting used to).

Final Rating: 5/5-Corporate Sponsored Superheroes.

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Welcome to animation quick look where I watch a few episodes of something animated and tell you if it’s worth your time.

In the year 2022, a hotly anticipated massive MMORPG, Sword Art Online is released and snatched up by gamers around the world. What makes Sword Art Online special is it’s “Nerve Gear” VR helmet, which makes everything feel more real. But once players log in, they find they can’t log out. The batshit insane creator of the game has locked everyone in and nobody can get out until the final level of the game is cleared. Worse yet if someone dies in the game, they die in real life. So noobs are truly fucked.

The show focuses on “Kirito”, who was an early beta tester and has some advanced knowledge, but is also pretty damn good at the game. He and other beta testers are actually outcasts as others think they have inside info they are holding back, which I think is a great angle to go with. Kiriko mainly fancies himself a solo player for this reason. But he has made a few friends, namely Asuna, a skilled swordswoman who is the glaringly obvious love interest, but they work pretty well as a couple so it’s fine.

At it’s base, Sword Art Online has a ton in common with your standard fantasy anime, but the interesting characters and the fact that while it’s a game that everyone should be working together to beat, but people are assholes and that keeps it interesting. I mean seriously, people murder each other in Sword Art Online, knowing that it will kill them in real life. That’s both fucked up and awesome. A guild leader gets murdered because she sold an item and another guild member wanted to keep it. In a video game. Over a fake item for fake money when they should be focused on killing the fake boss so they can get the fuck out of there. That’s human and awesome. Some do it just for fun, which is normal in a regular MMO, but again adds a level of awesome I wouldn’t expect.

To be fair, it’s not all fun and murder. Kirito and assorted friends look for rare items, protect the weak and occasionally remember to beat dungeon bosses so eventually they might get out (it’s been a little over two years in at the point I’m at story-wise). But they also start to like the life they have built in Sword Art Online and the friends they have made and are starting to get torn about what they really want.

Of course there are lingering questions. Namely why did the designer of the game do this? But also, what if there’s a fucking power outage or the internet goes down? And how they hell are their bodies staying alive outside the real world? I suspect we may never get a real answer to even the first question besides the guy being a crazy nutjob, but Sword Art Online still manages to keep me engaged and interested in the virtual world it’s presented and I’d highly recommend it for anyone looking for an entertaining fantasy anime.

Final Rating: 4.5/5-Online Trolls who kill people for reals

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In The Devil is a Part-Timer! (yes the exclamation point is part of the actual title) tells the tale of a demon king named Satan. He attempts to take over the world of Ente Isla and nearly succeeds, but is defeated and forced to flee to another world. That world? Why modern-day Japan of course. But things are different here. Satan has no money, very little magic power, no way back home and only one of his equally powerless faithful generals to help him. So while they search for a way to restore their powers and get back to Ente Isla in order to try and take over it again, Satan has to hold down a part-time job flipping burgers to pay the bills.

The Devil is a Part-Timer! Could’ve been horribly hokey but it’s an incredibly smart comedy. Sure, there’s the usual fish out of water jokes you get from this kind of setup, but the characters adapt pretty fast and it’s pretty funny to see Satan get excited about getting a raise or getting promoted at his menial job and put real effort into it. It could probably work on this premise alone but it adds great layers with various characters from Ente Isla pursuing him, namely Emilia Justina, the hero who drove him out in the first place who also has to hold down a job while keeping an eye on the demon king and making sure he’s not up to anything nefarious.

The characters are just a lot of fun. At one point another one of Satan’s generals, Lucifer shows up and causes trouble but Satan and Emilia actually team up to beat him and he just ends up living with Satan and his other general and becomes an online shopping addict as well as a very adept hacker (which leads to a pretty funny bit where they hack Emilia’s customer service station at her regular job as an “experiment”.). There’s also a couple other genuinely interesting subplots going on such as things happening back in Ente Isla that end up affecting the human world and the fact that Satan is actually… nice? Seriously, he cares about the people of this world, especially those closest to him (which includes Emilia in an odd sort off way) and seems to actually thrive at his job which hinges on being nice to the customers. Is this from him becoming human or was it a hidden side he had all along? Or is it simply to make everybody drop their guard for his eventual attempt to take over both worlds?

In the end it makes for a very intriguing and extremely entertaining comedy, the best I’ve watched in a while. I sat through 7 of the 13 episodes and had a great time and fully intend to finish the series in the next day or so and I’m sure I’ll be very disappointed that there’s only 13 episodes to enjoy.

Final Rating: 5/5 Former Demon Kings flipping burgers…

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I’ve seen some of the anime that crossed over and became a hit in the US, but Samurai Champloo evaded me, most likely because it was on at odd hours as part of adult swim, which admittedly I rarely watched. But this came stateside in 2005 and had a lot of buzz, but 9-10 years ago there wasn’t the easy access to anime we have today, so I as wondering how it would hold up.

The storyline itself is pretty basic, in ancient Japan two wandering Samurai, Mugen and Jin, don’t really care about much except fighting worthy opponents (or anyone who pisses them off, really). This gets them in a load of trouble up to the point they are set to be executed, but they are rescued by a plucky young waitress named Fuu, on the condition that they help her find a mysterious samurai who “smells of sunflowers”.

Samurai Champloo is tagged as a “hip-hop anime”, but whoever did that probably has no fucking clue and was just trying to make it “hip” to American audiences. It’s supposedly unique hook is these “record scratch” moments where it’ll make the sound of a record scratch like a DJ was playing and either pause or rewind for a second. I just found it off-putting and annoying, and there’s nothing else that would fit the label of “hip-hop”, the music is solid but nothing that stands out as particularly “hip-hop” style.

And it’s too bad that Samurai Champloo feels it has to do this stuff to be different, because it’s a perfectly solid and fun anime. The trio of characters are fun and interesting, the swordfights are stylish and great to watch, and the humor is mostly well done, albeit with a few bits that run for whole episodes and fall pretty flat (like one where an artist who tricks girls into slavery suddenly becomes comedically panicky or the episode with a “European” disgusing himself as a samurai). That record scratch stuff just feels completely unnecessary. If you are looking for a deep and complex story you won’t find it here though, through the six episodes I watched, there wasn’t much in the way of character or plot development to the point where I occasionally forgot  what the protagonists main goal even was. Often the episode has them coming into a town and something distracting them like a rice eating contest or Mugen and Jin getting bored and tired of Fuu and going off to do something else for a whole episode before happenstance brings them together again, with maybe one bit of info thrown in about the samurai they are searching for at the end of the episode. Up to this point, it’s not even explained why Fuu is looking for the Samurai, but admittedly it’s only 6 episodes in of a 26 episode run, that’s plenty of time to explain things. And I enjoyed their distractions, but I could see it be maddening to somebody who wants to find out the mystery behind the samurai and why Fuu needs to find him. I suspect you could watch the first episode to get the basic setup and watch the last few episodes and not miss out on much in the way of important developments. But I would also argue that Mugen, Jin & Fuu are a fun trio to watch no matter what they happen to be doing in a particular episode so it makes up for the overall pacing.

Final Rating: 3.5/5 Samurais who smell of sunflowers…

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It’s mainly the story of master wizard Ryner Lute & his travel companion Ferris Eris (again, really? it’s not just the title that’s awful), a woman highly skilled with her sword as they travel the land seeking relics of legend at the behest of their friend and King, Sion. It also shows Sion’s struggle to be a good king surrounded by corrupt nobles who treat commoners like shit.

I watched 6 episodes of this series and it has sort of an odd pace, it spends the first episode setting up the basic premise, then spends several episodes showing how Sion became king as well as how he, Ryner & Ferris all met. The episodes leading up to him becoming King and sending Ryner & Ferris out on their quest are very well done, but it makes the first episode seem like a waste of time and gives the overall series a bit of a pacing issue.

Ryner & Ferris mostly play off each other well, but the series relies a little too hard on a couple of running jokes between them. Namely that Ferris constantly physically abuses Ryner for virtually no reason (not uncommon in anime but this seems to really be overdoing it) and that she’s think Ryner is a lout and a pervert and thinks everything is he does is motivated by trying to get her into bed, which she has no evidence of, and while it’s a little funny at first, it gets old pretty quickly. Ryner isn’t a pervert, he’s just lazy and wants to nap. A lot. He says he wants to nap several times in an episode. We get it, he likes naps. But when the series isn’t relying on these crutches, the characters work a bit better and their chemistry shines through, especially in the well-animated battle sequences, which is pretty standard sword and sorcery stuff but still fun to watch.

Ryner & Ferris are mostly the comedy act, Sion, while allowed to have plenty of funny moments (especially in a scene where he checks up on them posing as Ryner’s “cousin”) has much more serious scenes as he’s dealing in a deadly game of political maneuvering that could get him and his closest friends killed if he’s not careful, throwing the kingdom right back into the corrupt nobleman he’s trying to keep it from. It can make for an odd tonal shift when you are laughing at a hilarious scene focused on Ryner and Ferris and suddenly it shifts to somebody being brutally murdered as part of a political ploy. It’s not that you can’t have these elements mix well, it’s just that Legend of the Legendary Heroes makes no real attempt to do so, just jumping between the storylines at a whim with no regard for consistency.

That being said, I overall enjoyed what I’ve watched so far, especially the political stuff and if they can keep it interesting and tone down the reliance on one-note running jokes and balance the comedy and serious stuff a little better (and maybe they will, I do intend to watch more) they may have something really special here.

Final Rating: 3.5/5-:Legendary relics that blow everything up…

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Ouran High School Host Club is honestly what would probably happen if someone from Japan watched Three’s Company and tried to make a cartoon roughly based on that idea. The prestigious Ouran Academy is only attended by insanely rich or incredibly smart people The Host Club is essentially a bunch of pretty boys from the school whose mission in life is to “make girls happy”. Haruhi Fujioka, a poor student at the academy on scholarship, accidentally breaks a very expensive base on her first day their owned by the club, and they decide she can pay off the debt by working for them a “Host”(what that really means I have no idea, it’s pretty vague). But due to her short hair, clothing, slightly deep voice (and tiny tits), she’s mistaken for a guy. Let the cross-dressing hijinks ensue!

Admittedly it’s an easy mistake to make, as Haruhi is far more masculine than anybody in the host club, and that’s not really an insult to her as this is the usual farce of suspended belief of a show like Three’s Company or Bosom Buddies where nobody would buy this for a second in real life. And that’s essentially what this is, a comedy farce that comes up with increasingly ridiculous situations along with the usual members of the opposite sex being extremely attracted to the girl pretending to be a guy although again since most of the guys are extremely feminine it sort of works.

This particular review is more akin to a Shit My Wife watches column. My wife is a huge nerd like myself. She watches a ton of anime. There’s plenty of good ones we both enjoy. But there’s also ones she watches that frankly cannot be classified as anything other than girly as fuck and something no straight man should ever watch. Ouran High School Host Club pretty much fits that definition to a T as I sat through seven episodes with her and immediately wanted to kill stuff in a grisly violent manner afterwards. I’m completely serious, I played about an hour of the latest Devil May Cry almost right after.

I do really like Haruhi as a character, she takes a very Daria-esque approach to this universe she’s blundered into of the insanely rich and usually calls people on their bullshit and sums people up really well and is amusingly blunt. It’s the rest of the characters I have issues with, like the two main male leads who call each other “Mother/Father” constantly, the twins, who as part of their act to attract girls, act very incestuous (and apparently this works as girls fawn over them whenever they do an act of “forbidden love” towards each other, and is it “acting” if they are doing everything short of fucking each other?). And then there’s Honey. Honey is a 3rd year (so at least 16) who looks like he’s six. Sure he’s tiny, but he acts like he’s six too, constantly going on about how cute he is and basically acting like a an obnoxious brat. I want to punch Honey in the face over and over again.

Also, the whole concept is ridiculously convoluted, the entire club knows within the first episode that Haruhi is a girl, so why keep up the farce? There’s not much reason to it. Sure there’s the really flimsy reason of her not being able to work as a Host to pay off the debt because Hosts must be male, but it’s extremely flimsy and leads to stupid stuff like her school physical being faked by the other members so she can stay as a Host. What? Why? If she had to come up with a clever way to get around it that’s one thing, but a lot of plot threads are basically resolved by the fact that all the other characters are super rich and just happen to own someone/something that can solve the problem. It’s also trying to have a little meta humor, but that basically amounts to characters saying something that happened previously was in a past episode.

That being said if you can get past all that, there are some surprisingly clever jokes and Haruhi herself is pretty enjoyable. Clearly I’m not anywhere near the intended audience for this and while I do acknowledge that, it seems like lazy writing to me that its not even trying to appeal to any guys who might be having to sit through it with their significant others.

Rating: 2.5/5 Twins who act gay but aren’t gay who are still gay…

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Last week, I reviewed Attack on Titan. It was fantastic but also brutal so admittedly I was looking for something a little lighter. Blood Lad is about Staz, a powerful but extremely lazy vampire. He is the boss of a demon territory, but all he really cares about is stuff from the human world, especially anything from Japan. He obsesses over manga (Japanese comics), video games and action figures and doesn’t particularly care about anything else. He thinks it’s a dream come true when Fuyumi, a human girl from Japan somehow has accidentally wandered into the demon world. Unfortunately it’s not long before she’s killed and becomes a ghost. At that point, Staz decides it’s his duty to revive her. Unfortunately, he has no idea how…

If you haven’t watched much anime, Blood Lad might seem pretty unique based on it’s premise, but really it’s not. It’s the Japanese version of your cookie cutter sitcom. There’s nothing horribly wrong with it, it’s well animated, it’s got a few solid laughs but demons and humans interacting and having separate worlds that interact is an extremely common theme in Japanese anime. The characters have extreme reaction to every single thing. They throw in the usual cute furry sidekick. give girls who are clearly of high school age huge tits and make them unusually sexual with constant references to their breasts and fleeting glimpses of nudity for no reason other than titillating desperate virgins. I don’t have an issue with animated nudity or sexuality and it can be used to comedic effect quite well but this just hammers it over your head again and again in every episode and feels extremely pervy.

And as oppossed to Attack on Titan where I watched a bunch of episodes because I was instantly hooked and wanted to keep watching, I watched about five episodes and figured that was enough. And the series is only ten episodes long. Even five episodes in there is clearly some filler material with Staz’s brother only giving him vital info about resurrecting Fuyumi if he’ll go kill a evil monster on the loose terrifying the various demon territories. What is this, an rpg? It’s not like the brother needs Staz’s help in taking the monster down, he’s more powerful than Staz is. It’s more like he feels it’s beneath him to get involved but he still needs to deal with it anyways (that does lead to one really good joke about Staz initially saying no because he just doesn’t give a shit).

The one really unique thing that I actually did enjoy is that most anime don’t really acknowledge that other anime exists and Blood Lad is filled with quick humorous references to things such as Naruto and Dragonball Z and Shonen Jump manga. But it’s not really enough to give the series a unique identity or anything.

If it sounds like Blood Lad is awful, it’s not. Overall I enjoyed it much more than I groaned at it. It’s a perfectly decent enjoyable anime that you can pretty much finish in an afternoon. It’s just doesn’t really do anything to stand out or be original. It’s the Japanese equivalent of a CBS sitcom. You might enjoy it while watching but then promptly forget about it not long after.

Rating: 3/5 Busty schoolgirls being eaten by carnivorous plants.

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So, moving on to my first review, Attack on Titan, which was one of the most popular anime series of 2013, so it has a ton of hype to live up to. The premise is pretty easily explained: Take the premise of Pacific Rim, but make the giant monsters mostly human looking (and naked but lacking genitals, thank god because I really didn’t want to look at giant dongs for a couple of hours, as it is you see plenty of giant ass) but technologically all the humans have to battle them with is cannons which barely do anything and swords. So yeah humanity is pretty well fucked. The last remnants have gathered in one big central city protected by a series of big walls. Things remain fairly peaceful for about a century (unless you dare to go outside the walls then if you are lucky you might come back with just one limb missing) but apparently the monsters were just holding out til they got bored, because they suddenly decide to take down the outermost wall and have no trouble doing so. After decimating most of the population of the outer city they mysteriously stop and everyone who survived has been evacuated to the inner wall. At this point the three young protagonists join the army with the intention of helping drive back the Titans (especially the main male, Eren, whose mother was killed and brutally eaten right in front of him) but when they resume attacking again five years later it all goes to shit and something drastic will have to happen if humanity is going to survive.

Probably the highest compliment I have to give this show is though I only intended to watch several episodes just to get a feel for it, I was pretty instantly hooked and ended up blasting through the first 10 and had to stop myself so I could actually write about it. On top of that it’s currently only available as subtitled rather than dubbed. I generally prefer dubbed just because it’s easier to follow but if a series is good enough I’ll have no issue with subtitles and that was certainly the case here.

The first thing that really struck me is the brutality. This series pretty much has an Game of Thrones attitude about it’s characters with interesting good characters constantly introduced and then savagely killed. And that’s good, because it makes the Titans a very viable threat instead of usual lumbering idiots who you know the heroes will always defeat and save the day without anybody even getting a scratch. The general style and fight sequences especially are pretty awesome, especially when the humans use “3D combat” where they basically fly around with hooks and gas canisters trying to take down the giant Titans. And it goes well beyond the simple soldiers vs. giants plot with Government incompetence and hubris, secret medical experimentation and corruption that adds a lot of compelling mystery and intrigue.

My one real complaint? The title doesn’t make a ton of sense. The monsters are called Titans sure, but Attack on Titan sounds more like some kind of space battle than humanity’s last stand against a nearly invincible enemy. But aside from that this is a ridiculously great series that at only 25 episodes would certainly be an excellent way to get your feet wet on serious mature animation.

Rating: 5/5 Giant naked humans

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