HappinessCharge Precure! episode 10 blew my mind.

By TheBigN

I’ve been enjoying the silly earnestness of HappinessCharge PreCure! in general. It’s not a show that will be winning much praise compared to its fellow compatriots anytime soon, from what I’ve seen others say (it’s only my second Precure I’m following, at that), but many concepts (Precure across the world, powers as your imagination takes you from what I’ve seen Cure Lovely do, etc.) are interesting to poke at, and I hope the show does that in its own time. The animation has been pretty consistent (not great, but no major problems for me) for the show as well, so it threw me for a loop at what happened with episode 10, with images like this:

Kyousogiga — Chaos Capital Cartoon

by dm00

High above Not-Kyoto

I haven’t had so much fun since I first saw Noiseman Sound Insect. It’s like all the madness of FLCL compressed into one caffeine-maddened episode (no Pillows, though).

Poor Koto and her brothers seem to have been sucked into the world of gods and yokai, where they have special chaotic powers of their own. There’s a rabbit involved, and the episode begins with an extended quotation from Lewis Carroll, just in case you didn’t get the message. But this is no slavish adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Apparently it’s a one-shot ONA, though the end holds out hope for more.

Immelman Turn! ep 1 of Fam the Silver Wing in 10,001 pictures

by dm00

Welcome back, Dio. Click for insanely large .png (133 MB)

A more sane 14MB version

Update: checked my math. I blame the symmetry around the comma.

12 Days of Anime, Day 5: The Sense of Wonder

By TheBigN

I very much enjoyed the first eight music videos that comprised Gurren Lagann Parallel Works, where members of the cast of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann were thrust into alternate worlds, or at other periods in their lives besides that of the specific timeline the series was based in. At the same time, you don’t need to have any knowledge about the show at all to enjoy them as well. So I was pretty damn ecstatic about hearing that there were seven more episodes to come this year, and checked them out when I heard that they came out. As with the first set, I enjoyed all of the videos, animated by different animators associated with GAINAX, and focusing on different genres as well. But as luck would have it, the first video of Parallel Works 2, “The Sense of Wonder” blew me away, and remained my favorite of them all:

Animated by Akemi Hayashi, the cast is moved into a more fantastical world, where Lagann is relegated to a toy, and Nia acts as an entertainer and is kept by Lord Genome. What remains the same are things like the relationships between Kamina and Simon/Yoko, the burgeoning love between Simon and Nia, and the caste system with Lord Genome at the apparent head of it all (hah hah!).  And the music, with vocals by Ai Ujita (singer for BlueBlue/I’s Cube), is fantastical, solemn but hopeful, and helps narrarate the story as well as spoken word probably could.  “The Sense of Wonder” tells a lot in it’s 5 minutes and leaves a lot unsaid and known, but for me, it was just beautiful.

12 Days of Anime, Day 10: Rrrules vs. Anarchy

Sometimes while watching anime, there are moments where I get bowled over by what I happen to be viewing at the time, and to me that’s always a good sign. And then there are moments where I feel like I just get steamrolled over, and it takes a while to recover from that, which is where lasting moments can kick in and stay. One such moment occurs in episode 6 of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, where our heroine angel sisters do battle with a pair of demon sisters bent on wreaking havoc on the home setting of Daten City with artificial Ghosts (what Panty and Stocking must defeat in order to get back into Heaven) using a “Ghost Stone”. This probably sounds a little better in context than without. But the results are breathtaking regardless.