Year in Review: Sunshine & Kisses Drive to Origination, Shrine Maidens Lost Memories in Coded Euphoric Frontier
Running for your lives.
With style.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
Hidamari Sketch 14/365
Thanks to those of you who put this list together. You know who you are.
January 11: Winter Collage - Episode 1
February 13: Heart and Body - Episode 5
March 13: 3% Hope - Episode 8
April 28: Mar Cabbage - Episode 11
May 18: Singing Short Cake - Episode 4
June 17: Another Indian - Episode 3
July 14: Cool and Laid Back - Episode 6
August 11 - S5
August 21: Japan’s Summer - Episode 2
September 4: Wolf of Ura-Shinjuku - Episode 9
October 12: The Storm of Drying Packets - Episode 7
November 3: Yuno-sama - Episode 10
November 26 - S6
December 25: Goodbye Ume-sensei - Episode 12
I missed the boat for the first 3 episodes, but will make an attempt to start Spring with the right foot forward.
Welcome to Liberty City? I guess if you’re high on GTA4 you probably won’t be reading this anyways. I thought this episode was a good primer for this April 28th, 2008.
Slice-of-life is like that.
What am I doing? For the uninitiated, I’m going through the first season of Hidamari Sketch on the dates of those episodes. April 28 was the date for episode 11, so I watched that episode on that date.
It’s seasonally delicious!
Year in Review: Shafting of the Shrewd
This is really a two-fer (or three-fer): ef, Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and Hidamari Sketch; and anime as animation, doing what it is suppose to do.
Not long ago I finished the last episode of ef - a tale of memories. It’s by far the most impressive anime of 2007. Sadly that’s just my impression and not a lasting opinion tested with time, but it was hard to deny that ef was a gimmick intended to impress. Much like Zetsubo Sensei and Hidamari Sketch, ef is the product of SHAFT, the same studio and pretty close to the same production team.
Well, except Shin Oumura, the credited director. He gave ef that touch that reminded me why Makoto Shinkai’s film will probably never break into the mainstream. Akiyuki Shinbo being the “supervising” director only contributed to how some of the scenes look. Can we say red and black railroad crossings? The other two works are Shinbo’s direct results, probably, with him labeled as the director (and who can forget his happy mug in the OP for Zetsubo Sensei?).
I can also really care much less about Sunshine Sketch’s healing properties. The serendipitous 4-koma original stuff is, I’m sure, good on its own. But that’s not here or there. The TV animation series is brilliant in how it transforms your typical manga adaptation into something unexpected, clever, but all the more expressive. And the stuff it expresses are not merely words from a book or plot points in an outline, but feelings and perspectives and attitudes. And you know Sunshine Sketch is good because, I guess, what was good to the animation staff has been transmitted through the show and to your soul! L33t haxxorz they are.
In fact, with all three series there’s this kind of connection that I see with the anime and its viewer. It’s a bridge, a protocol that transmits the beyond-mere-words content of a story to its viewer. Sure, it’s not unusual for anime to achieve this, but so few bridges are so weird and daring yet charming at the same time. It was fun.
Well. That’s that. But in the context of what’s notable in 2007, we should compare these three shows with stuff like like Denno Coil and Seirei no Moribito.
Because, lol, can you say SHOESTRING BUDGET?
Sweet Aftertaste: A Brief Rundown of Sorts
When the episode ends with putting a smile on your face, I think that’s a good thing.
Of course, sometimes it’s just a cheating cheap trick that’s doing the smirking for you. (Hello wawawa wait I forgot what show I’m mocking?) Gurren Lagann’s rather-epic end to the first 13 episodes is a good example of how to do it so honestly, on the other hand. But still, you aren’t sure if you are smiling because you know we’re going into a recap episode and jump forward in time (yay non-loli NonoNia), or because you’re still on the well-animated euphoria of good old battle robot…goodness.
On the flip side there’s this さよなら絶望
Sort of like Sky Girls TV, actually. Although I think, like Yin, I might have to use my fingers for that one.
On a completely unrelated subject, this is pretty cool–and you won’t see it in a street racing anime:
