Upcoming Anime

Nope, this is not a rather late season preview nor is it another first impressions post. This is an announcement for the Upcoming Anime page (see? It’s right there below the picture of Setsuna). It’s a list of ALL the upcoming anime and…well, I suppose the best way to understand what it is is to just click on it.

Hetalia Axis Powers episode 23

No chibitalia this week. Man how I miss those guys…*sarcasm*

 This time we get a moe character, something this anime needed after the softcore shotacon that didn’t exist in episode 22 that didn’t exist either.

What makes Pandora Hearts so enjoyable

Because it makes arm-wrestling fabulous!

This post is mainly just an image dump but there’s some genuine thoughts about Pandora as well. Plus a picture of Alice and who doesn’t want to see more Alice.

Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 episode 2: More fun with Haruhi

I’m running late on catching up to Haruhi’s review but then again, I was very choosy with the available fansubs. I’m sure that Haruhi Season 2 had finished running on Japan’s TVs and I’m caught up with the late fansubs; that I’m putting them to blame nor should I be complaining to get my hands on illegal download copies of most of my anime collection (I do have some original purchase, okay?). Now, where was I on Haruhi this time? Oh yeah! Summer break. And that means Haruhi is hitting that vacation mode. The show is getting better, perhaps? More after the jump.

k-on! episode 12: finale! and episode 13 (extra): a winter day

There’s a fair share of people out there who are glad to see K-ON! come to an end. There probably are another handful of people who don’t even know what K-ON! is. As a watcher, follower, and reviewer of K-ON! – while I do genuinely enjoy the series – I have to admit that I’m not sad to see the anime series come to a close. That’s probably because it wasn’t the kind of intense story that gets you in your gut, that sticks in your mind, or shakes your soul. K-ON! has sort of been like the after taste of a good candy: it lingers but after a while, you kind of forget that you’ve eaten it.

Is anime simply just ‘a cartoon made in Japan’

Lets do some imaginative work here. Imagine that the creators of D-Gray Man want to make a sequel. Let’s call this new anime ‘D-Gray Man Shippuden’. So the production team get together, hire all their old voice actors and get everything ready until BOOM! Their studio gets hit by an earthquake and all their equipment gets destroyed (this is not entirely unbelievable. There’s meant to be a giant earthquake about to hit Tokyo soon, at least according to Bones). So D-Gray Man Shippuden can’t be made.

But wait! Step in a Russian billionaire. Russia is a great place for billionaires. This guy is an otaku who is quite a fan of the D-Gray man manga. He heard of the terrible news and decided he really wanted to see the later chapters animated. So what does he do? Why, the only logical option is to build his own studio in Russia and hire the company to come over and animate the new season. Of course he owns the rights and gets a percentage of the profits but the anime is still in Japanese and gets aired of Japanese television in it’s old time slot. But this doesn’t get listed as an anime as it wasn’t made in Japan.

Something seems wrong here doesn’t it. Lets take a few more examples: The latest CLAMP manga gets animated by a french company because they offered them more money. CLAMP is pretty much definitive anime and yet this also wouldn’t count. Or how about South Parks studio moves over to Japan for a new season (or even better, the creators of Avatar move to Japan to create a new show with the exact same animation style). Do these suddenly count as anime? It’s not animation style either, otherwise Kaiba’s claim to be an anime gets changed to just being a funky Dr.Seass style cartoon.

So where does the wall end?