I’ve always been a big fan of Lupin III. It’s not high art by any means, but the fun characters, cool artwork, great music, and thrilling (if often predictable) capers are simply too alluring for me to resist. It’s a nice mega-franchise, and with so many episodes and films to choose from, one that usually offers just what I need when I want to turn my brain off and enjoy some decidedly old school animation. Much like the five other…
Over the garden wall, Virtuous souls may be lead astray with Every fiber of their contents stalled, and a Requiem sounding for their eventual demise. This may not be the end for them, However, upon greater reflection. Evil cries out for these lost beings; Giving up in the face of the unknown excites it, And the roots of despair take hold, Readying for the growth of new fuel. Deny it the pleasure, for your own sake; Everlasting is the spirit…
For my initial impression on Aldnoah.Zero, please refer to my entry on the Summer Clusterfuck Week 1. When I first experienced Aldnoah.Zero, I summed up my opinion piece *points upward enthusiastically*, with the note that this is Urobuchi at his most blasé. Well… little did I know Urobuchi would depart by Episode 3’s end, leaving the rest of the season under someone else’s responsibility. So, as a result what I saw after the first three episodes was not the intended…
A big part of me wants to say that this is a great time for “adult animation”. Archer and The Venture Brothers are frequently finding new depths to late night animated affairs, while Bob’s Burgers and Rick and Morty have made up some of the most consistent laughs of any shows on TV. Yet at the same time, The Simpsons will never be as good as it was in its prime, Family Guy will never be as good as your…
One of my least favourite things in animation and entertainment in general is when something with a lot of potential fails to meet even a fraction of the greatness that I personally feel is meant for it. In fact, shows with missed potential irk me more than just plain bad series; it’s easy for me to chuckle and move on from the Breadwinners or Fish Hooks of the world, because I don’t expect too much from them and don’t feel…
A lot of ‘memorable’ anime emerged from the year 2013 – Free!, Kill la Kill, Gatchaman Crowds, The Flowers of Evil, the names are presumably endless. But from the titles I’ve namedropped, I can only see one anime becoming truly ‘memorable’ – that being Kill la Kill – and soon the rest will be lost to the cults. One anime from 2013 guilty of being forgotten in the future is undeniably Attack on Titan, a show so hyped up it…
One of my associates made a rather poignant statement when he expressed the appeal of Kenzen Robo Daimidaler. He noted it was a love letter to all the shitty OVAs released in the 1990s. I don’t think the word ‘love’ aptly describes the contents of the letter Daimidaler wrote. Instead of wistful nostalgia and gentlemanly kisses to a long ago love, the ‘love’ letter is written crudely with a lot of eager rhetoric detailing weird, bizarre things it wants to…
Of all the scenes I remember in the original How to Train Your Dragon, it was the moment where Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is confronted by his father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Buter) about befriending a dragon. Eventually it comes to a head where Stoick declares “They killed hundreds of us!” and Hiccup retorts “And we killed thousands of them!” I was struck odd by the peculiar disparity of the casualty numbers between Vikings and dragons; as if Hiccup was insinuating…
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has its fair share of formidable villains. No, I’m not talking about the Big Bads within the series but something a bit more abstract. Season 2’s true Big Bad was the absence of Lauren Faust from the majority part of the creative process; Season 3’s was a short 13-episode season that halfway as it was about to hit its stride, somebody started playing award show wrap-up music; and for Season 4 the show confronted…
Editor’s Note: Hello and Welcome to After the Cel Shading, where we down the triumphs and trip-ups of recently finished cartoons like glasses of iced tea/cyanide smoothies/whatever. Hopefully you didn’t understand the reference, but this is something I want to do to get myself off the ground as well as help to encapsulate a number of opinions that would either be lost on Twitter or on some random forum. So have fun, or not, but probably you should. Maybe get…