The Anime Music Tournament 2013 Bracket Kagami – Round 1 – Polls 1-8 “Analysis”

By TheBigN

Pretty glad we’re more than halfway through this first round. This gets tiring after a while, but luckily the songs don’t, as these two polls indicate.

The Anime Music Tournament 2013 Bracket Hanyuu – Round 1 – Polls 1-8 “Analysis”

By TheBigN

Innocent Starter, guys? Really? Innocent Starter?!? Hau hau indeed (though I hate that catchphrase)…

Every bracket so far has had interesting results (by “interesting”, I mean results that make me shake my head when I read them again and again). Let’s see what’s cooking in the two polls in this group.

The Anime Music Tournament 2013 Bracket Ein – Round 1 – Polls 1-8 “Analysis”

By TheBigN

Here we go again with the fifth round of polls with the Ein bracket. Both polls are open this time around, so hoping for some good votes here.

Madoka Magica and the Weight(lessness?) of Expectations

By TheBigN

Given the amount of coverage this blog has had with this show, this won’t be the last you’ll hear from us for sure. Spoilers obviously abound here.

Show Some Love For Kyubey

By TheBigN (Yarr spoilers yarr)

So I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Puella Magi Madoka Magica so far.  As others who watch know, it’s been a little crazy ride so far, and it casts some nice new looks at the general concept of a “magical girl”, or at least brings up viewpoints that probably haven’t been really stressed in a while. I like the final product of a sort of “dream team” in my eyes (Shinbou, Kajiura and Ume) as it’s been so far. And I very much enjoy how the show just keeps us guessing as to what happens next, with the fact that I don’t mind at all if I’m completely wrong about what I think some of the main concepts are of the show (granted, I doubt it’s productive to do that in the first place).

Of course, with a show with this much notoriety, there’s a lot of comments that are all over the place in terms of praises and complaints about how things are. Some of them come off to me as asinine, like “Madoka should stop being so emo (she’s be pretty damn crazy if she was able to shake off traumatic stuff days after like it was nothing)”, and others are entirely justified, like animosity towards that poker-faced mascot, Kyubey (or Kyuubee, or QB, whatever floats your boat), based on his actions with our “magical girls”. At the same time though, Kyubey’s induces much more laughter than hate from my mind, and he’s (she’s? it’s?) definitely one of my favorite characters in the show. It’s hard not to admire how he tries so hard to get his contracts down.

I think the lesson here is not to trust someone with a face like that to give you a fair deal. By 塩犬 at http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=16111219

Madoka Magica 1: I don’t usually do this but…

TheBigN

And no, I’m probably not going to do this for each episode. Probably. :v

Yeah, I was kind of like this after the first half.

Watching the first half of this episode, I felt like everything (the music, the character interactions, the situations, so on and so forth) save SHAFT’s character animations (!!!) was trying too hard to set up at least the normal life of Madoka. Being a fan of SHAFT X Shinbo, Yuki Kajiura and Aoki Ume, through that period I was thinking to myself “Calm down guys. You got this” as if it was a team that I don’t want to lose/fail. And I don’t, because I know what each can do when they’re at their best, and how often does a show combine things I like together? I’d watch this dream team’s result regardless of how it turns out, hopefully having more good vibes than not.

Totally unexpected mustaches. And great ones at that.

But after the initial Madoka/Homura conversation, the overall “feel” of the show seemed to calm down and go smoother. Even as things got WTF (gogo Gekidan Inu Curry) and awesome (gogo UNLIMITED GUN WORKS). More than likely because things got WTF and awesome.

And Tatsuya is so damn adorable.

Also kind of liked how besides Madoka, her family, Sayaka, Himura, Mimi and Kyube, no-one else’s name was mentioned. This despite a lot of relative screentime for characters like the teacher and that middle-class friend. Hope that sort of remains that way on purpose.

Revolutionary Girl Madoka Magica

by Link

Hey, I’m not dead yet.

As a frequent visitor to the SHAFT Bar & Girl, I was heavily intrigued the second I heard about rumors of the studio’s Power of Anime (Anime no Chikara, Aniplex’s now-defunct timeslot that pumped out three A-1 Pictures ventures of varying quality) series. Reports were swirling around of a SHAFT original cartoon, another promising entity.  Put two and two together and that makes for Akiyuki Shinbo’s possible next big hit. Remember that Aniplex funded their very successful Monstory (Bakemonogatari). This project came to be known as Puella Magi Magica Madoka, SHAFT’s upcoming original magical girl series, to be airing this January. Aniplex has brought together a dream team of Akiyuki Shinbo as director, Ume Aoki as original character designer, Gen Urobuchi as scriptwriter, Takahiro Kishida working on the adapted TV designs, and Yuki Kajiura composing the music. The official site unusually features voice samples, as visual novels often do, of all five core characters. This means they’re serious.