First Reactions: Space Brothers Episode 58

This week’s episode yielded a number of enlightening gems regarding Vincent Bold’s worldview. The most amusing of which is that he’s anti-Webb, but his animosity towards other groups which work on different aspects of space exploration is something not at all uncommon in the astronomical community. Fortunately, Mutta was there to remind him that we’re all really on the same team. And keep the entire episode from being just a (great) October Sky homage.

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Fun With Numbers: Recency Bias and Boom-Bust Cycles in Anime Fandom

In a previous post made approximately forever ago, I tackled the idea of “churn”; that anime fandom was constantly gaining new fans and losing old ones, at a rate high enough to cause significant institutional memory loss. Long story short, it turned out there was a distinct, cliff-like loss of popularity corresponding pretty closely with the introduction of Blu-Ray to the market in 2007-08, but not a constant one over time.

Here’s another angle on the idea, though: there may not be a constant change in popularity, but what about rating? Are people giving newer anime higher scores in general? That’s what I’m going to examine here.

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First Reactions: Devil Survivor 2 Episode 7

This week’s episode of Devil Survivor 2 was the blandest one of the show, and will probably end up skippable even if the later episodes end up being good (something I’m beginning to seriously doubt).

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Final Review: Demon Prince Enma OVA (10/10)

With the obvious exception of Ozamu Tezuka, no single person has created more classic anime characters than Go Nagai, the father of super robots (Mazinger Z) and perverted comedy (Harenchi Gakuen). So it makes sense that his characters get the reboot treatment a lot. Demon Prince Enma is the most ambitious interpretation of his work I’ve seen to date, taking characters from a comedy featuring demons with butts for heads, aging them 10 years, and thrusting them smack in the middle of a dark, shrimp and grits horror story.

Point of order before I begin, there is a certain flavor of story arc that only the best of creators can play. I call it the “dice in a cup” arc. It’s the term I use to describe what happens when characters in a scenario feel like dice spinning around in a heavily-shaken cup, slamming against each other and changing trajectories in way that feel at the same time natural and totally unpredictable. This is one of those things that’s very eye-testy; it’s very hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. Demon Prince Enma has one such arc, a testimony to its general excellence.

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Anime Movie Slaparound: Wolf Children

Welcome to the latest installment of the column where we, the Animetics crew, trade lowbrow thoughts on stuff we just finished! In this installment, we discuss the 2013 Tokyo Anime Fair Best Animation Winner, Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children, and the many ways it disappointed us.

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For one, it focused far too heavily on this element rather than a more solid core story

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First Reactions: Arata Kangatari Episode 6

Not only are some of the villains now good guys, and not only are the real villains better established, but this shift in circumstances was shown via their actions (rather than pseudoexciting revelationary monologue), and we even got some decent fight scenes to go with it all. Now *that* was a halfway climax!

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First Reactions: Muromi-san Episode 6

I got an email the other day (my first one, so thanks, anonymous reader Y!) asking why I’m blogging this show over Attack on Titan, which also airs on Saturday. There are two main reasons, which I want to briefly address that before moving into the meat of the episode.

First, good comedies are no less difficult to produce than good dramas. If you handed Astro Fighter Sunred, Panty and Stocking, or another comedy that relies on its particular sense of style (workplace-themed deadpan and rampant excess, respectively) to a replacement-level handler like Chiaki Kon or Yuu Kou, you’d almost certainly get something darn near forgettable. A comedy has to have real personality to work, which is something that’s not at all easy to do; just because they seem* to come along more often than dramas doesn’t mean a good laugh is worth any less than a good teardrop. Muromi-san specifically happens to be a *very* well-executed comedy, as it’s effectively mixing the high-energy of Angel Beats with the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and subtly clever camera play of Joshiraku, and has a ceiling as a low-tier 10/10 on my ranking scale.

Second, while I like Titan quite a bit, it has a plot I’m very familiar with as a reader of the manga. It means that a) there’s less I can legitimately speculate on, b) I don’t want to spoil anything by accident, and c) I’d only be able to comment on the execution, which I find slow and less interesting than the wham-bam lightning rod pacing of the manga. It’s distinctly my third-favorite Saturday show at this point. Which is, if anything, a mark of how fun Saturdays this spring have been.

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First Reactions: Space Brothers Episode 57

Space Brothers continuously comes off as an incredibly well-researched show. That’s not just in the macro sense (knowing which NASA agencies handle what, and the order in which astronaut training proceeds) but in the very micro sense as well; this episode was a great window into the minds of people smack in the middle of a design process trying to solve five problems at once.

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Final Review: Mysterious Girlfriend X (8/10)

Full disclosure: Mysterious Girlfriend X is a show about a couple that swaps spit on a daily basis. If you’re the type of person who rejects shows on premise, you probably won’t give this one any more of a chance than reading the plot summary. Once you get past that one hurdle, though, the show is a decent romance which gets a lot of extra punch from an ominous, quirky soundtrack and an approach that treats the characters with dignity.

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First Reactions: Devil Survivor 2 Episode 6

For an episode that spent about half its time focusing on one battle scene, this week’s Devil Survivor 2 really ought to have been more interesting than it was. It’s hard to talk about the major focus of this week’s episode without using the word “anticlimax”.

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