I think early Trigger has some great examples of anime as a visual medium - things like Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill have such a distinct visual style that would be impossible to replicate using live action or CGI. FMA and Frieren could, however, just as easily be in a different visual medium and be more or less the same. And you’re right that the fight scenes in each are fairly forgettable. I think the only one that stands out to me in FMA: Brotherhood is the one towards the end with Wrath. And I say this as someone who has seen a lot of anime - literally hundreds of series.

I saw both FMA and Brotherhood when they were airing. They’re both fine. Just not particularly complex or notable. I dunno what to tell you. I like Princess Tutu and Monster. Those are examples of “not bland” anime.

Frieren is a fine anime, but both it and FMA are wildly overrated. They’re both popular shonen anime with cool action sequences and are both mainstream enough to not be offputting for general audiences. They’re pretty much designed to be popular and accessible, but that degree of accessibility also makes them somewhat bland.

It’s an adaptation of a manga. Specifically an extremely perverse yuri lolicon manga about a girl who is obsessed with magical girls only to become a magical bad guy and wind up forced to fight them. Expect a lot of underage same sex BDSM. Not really something I personally feel comfortable watching.

I really like Pride’s dress. The contrasting deep red and black kind of reminds me of Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts outfit, or a variation on it, but way more toned down and realistic while still having frills around the collar and rose embellishments at the bottom.

I don’t think the series is anything special or terribly unique, but I enjoyed the first episode more than I thought I would. Also I like the outfits in these sword and sorcery style otome reincarnation anime. It’s way more appealing than seeing characters dressed as bog standard high school or middle school students for 95% of the time.

At first impression, this feels like the kind of shojo television series and manga that is consumed almost solely by men who fetishize the idea of saving an abused, overly demure woman from a bad situation. It’s like if you take Cinderella and remove any semblance of personal agency from the main character of that story. Don’t get me wrong, I like me a nice woobie character, but dial it back, story.

This show is straight 100% total schlock. I mean, describe the series on paper without making it sound stupid. It’s impossible:

“There’s this guy who is a (kinda) half-oni pitfighter working for a carnival in a Japanese slum who meets an immortal (kinda) 14 year old girl, who is actually 900 years old. She has her head in a birdcage and is carried everywhere by her #battlemaid. The half-oni pitfighter guy fights the #battlemaid and wins because he’s the bestest fighter ever. The woman who is just a head now was attacked by a different half-oni because half-oni are special (kinda) in that they make it so that when they hurt you wounds take longer to heal, which (somehow) translates into her magical regenerative powers not working and causing her to not regrow her body (which they stole and left her head behind because…why not?), which is something that she, as the world’s only immortal, can just do (I guess). The head and the pitfighter guy make a deal to travel to Europe (which is thankfully very small, as well as geographically, culturally, and linguistically homogeneous and an easy place to find one specific person) to try and find the person who (conveniently) turned him into a half-oni and who stole her body (for some reason). Mr. Bodysnatcher has an M on his cane and totally won’t turn out to be Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, because that’d be totally stupid for a detective mystery battle shonen to asspull Moriarty as its main villain. In order to prevent the pitfighter guy from going full murder hobo because of his powers (for some reason), the pitfighter has to totally make out with the 14 year old girl who is a 900 year old decapitated head now on the reg (yes, it’s totally essential to the plot). Also, after they find John M-Cane, the decapitated woman wants pitfighter to kill her for reasons that the show hasn’t bothered to go into yet and which the pitfighter never asked about. Also being a half-oni makes the pitfighter have terrible physical deformities, such as a set of very sick looking full body tattoos and literally nothing else like horns or a barbed dick (as far as we know).”

It’s a remarkably unnecessary contrast. Some of the animation comes across as borderline experimental, but the content is as tame and milquetoast as you can get. It makes you wonder who the director thinks this anime is for.

No, not really. The original manga is very…cozy. It has a simplistic, soft kind of visual style that fits for the “fluffy” and, let’s be honest, superficially cute source material. This anime is incredibly visually busy and has a lot of cinematographic decisions that are extremely distracting. For example, the opening sequence focuses on characters walking and the camera is almost always below waste height, almost leering at character’s legs. When it’s not doing this, it’s just extreme closeups of the show’s female lead. This is exacerbated by a genuinely nauseating blend of CGI and traditional animation. Honestly, the animation should probably be reminiscent of the animation for Nichijou. This is more like the animation for Land of the Lustrous, except that visual style worked for Land of the Lustrous because it had a lot of vibrant action setpieces. This simply does not.

That said, I’ll probably watch every episode of this show because I’m a [redacted] for romcoms, but I’ll also probably complain about the series and every episode each week.

Long story short, 7/10.

Most western comic book properties that get some kind of anime adaptation are typically pretty bad. Anyone remember Marvel Anime?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

If you want a more specific argument for why this will probably suck, let’s take a look at who’s directing this. The director for the series is Eri Osada, who has typically worked as animation director on a bunch of series. But animation director and series director are very different things. Their series directing experience solely encompasses two episodes of two separate anime: JoJo’s Bizarre Experience: Diamond is Unbreakable and Jujutsu Kaisen. This doesn’t guarantee that the project will be a stinker, but projects with a high degree of confidence behind their success don’t typically go to novice directors.

One thing I will say is that I like the writers attached to the series, as they’re the creative duo behind Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song. Still, this seems like a project meant to put money into pockets and not any kind of genuine creative endeavor, as if someone drew the name of a DC comics property followed by a genre of anime out of a hat.

Unsurprising to see. Jigokuraku is a solid anime based on a solid, if not amazing, manga. If you’re interested in a supernatural shonen battle anime, this one is one of the better ones. It’s better than Jujutsu Kaisen (not that the bar for that is very high since JJK is not very good), is reasonably well paced, has a self-contained story, and ends after a reasonable amount of time. The one thing I don’t care for in regards to the anime is pacing. The anime is fairly slow, with each chapter being one episode thereabouts. You could easily fit two full chapters into a given episode, though. Maybe cut out some parts of the manga from the anime, and then have the full series done with over the course of around 4 cours. It seems like every anime today tries to be a shot for shot adaptation of the source material. Which I know the fans generally like, but not everything necessarily translates that cleanly between mediums and the adaptation suffers because of it.

I’m definitely happy to accept the explanation of “this is what the author wanted to do to make the story happen” as the definitive explanation for it. It’s a work of creative fiction. Some elements just need to exist for the sake of the story actually happening and being entertaining. It’s just annoying because it’s a decent show and that particular element kinda glares at you. I’d imagine it’s one of those things that’ll be significantly less pleasant to deal with on rewatches, since your brain will be screaming “this entire subplot hinges on these two assholes being pathologically incapable of basic human communication” at certain points.

Summer season looks pretty weak, overall. That’s purely an observation based in personal taste, but I don’t think I’ll be alone in that sentiment. Spring was pretty solid for romcom fans like myself. Summer a lot less so. Not saying there’s none of those, but the ones coming out are of a lower tier, IMO, than what we’ve recently had.

I know the light novel ended a while ago and decent progress has been made through the series. Part of me hopes they’d have a more consistent release for the series and just finish the entire thing.

The quality of the original comes from the dynamic of the main cast. They’re each awful people in their own distinct way, and they each basically incentivize each other to be even worse than if they were surrounded by purely normal or decent human beings. That’s entertaining. It’s basically the anime equivalent of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Imagine if you had a show that was just about Charlie or Mac when they were in high school? That might be kinda entertaining, but the premise artificially confines the character and what they can do.

Yes, that element of the show is remarkably contrived. Imagine living with another person for 15 years, with a shared experience that is literally physical evidence of the supernatural. And you don’t…talk about it? To try and determine the nature of what happened to you or if you have some kind of shared quality that maybe explained how or why it happened? Really? I mean, anime fans complain incessantly about how much they hate artificial drama derived from misunderstandings that can be cleared up by a 30 second conversation and this right here is like the atomic bomb equivalent of that.

Not a huge fan of the implied quasi-incest. Ruby says that her Doctor was her first love. Aqua is that Doctor. Her biological brother is now her first love. And then there’s Aqua implying in previous episodes that Ai, his current body’s biological mother, was his first love. If there were some deeper meaning behind that, I wouldn’t have any criticism of it, but this is a fairly run of the mill high school dramedy focusing on the entertainment industry (if you ignore the magical realist reincarnation elements). So, it just comes across as very peculiar and somewhat unsettling character window dressing.