Bones

“Bang!” | The Guns of Cowboy Bebop

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Cowboy Bebop‘s cultural influences trace heavily to classic action cinema, be it Hollywood or Hong Kong, western or noir. And though most will remember Bebop for its martial arts and the Bruce Lee stylings that define the leading man, the gunplay in Bebop scratches quite the itch.

It’s not like there haven’t been tons of good gunfights in anime, even in recent years, but they often lose out to melee combat, be it realistic or stylized. There’s something about the gunplay in anime of the 90s and the early 2000s that feels distinct.

Continue reading →

An Informal Praise of My Hero Academia

/ thesakurasunrise / 1 Comment

My Hero Academia is the only long-running Shonen anime that I have watched since its beginning and that I’ve kept up with since. Most other shonen are too long for me to get past the barrier to entry, so getting in on the ground floor was a great feeling. It helped that Bones was producing it and that its premise was so appealing.

80% of the world’s population has superpowers except for our protagonist? And we’re promised that – somehow, despite that – he will become the world’s greatest hero? It’s a great premise with a classic long-term promise of what’s to come. Funnily enough, despite that premise not being entirely accurate, it captured people’s attention in no time. By 2017, it was one of the biggest anime in the world.

… And for some reason I’ve never formally reviewed it until now. And with each passing season, the prospect of rewatching previous seasons to go over them seemed rather ambitious given my already inconsistent binging capabilities. So I had resigned myself to never reviewing the series. But now, five seasons and two movies strong, with the third film in theaters at the time of writing, I find myself tempted to say “screw it” and do it anyway.

So here is my review of all of My Hero Academia before the new movie comes out!

Plus ultra

My 5 Favorite Anime Endings

/ thesakurasunrise / 2 Comments

It’s the end of 2020… nearly. For December, I’m taking another hiatus to do some fiction writing. While I wouldn’t call it a grand finale, given how rough the year has been for many, it’s still worth celebrating that it is still ending. To celebrate, why not shout out the stories that know how to conclude the best.

Glass Reflections on YouTube often has said that “the ending is paramount” and despite my disagreements with him, I can’t disagree with him on that one. The ending of a story can make or break it. The conclusion of SAO: Ordinal Scale made the plodding narrative leading up to it all worth it. On the flip side, the last five minutes of Black Butler II ruined an otherwise exciting season in retrospect.

So here are a few of my favorite endings that left on a high note, redeeming lesser qualities or acting as the culmination of greater ones. They made me cry, they made me giggle uncontrollably, or they left me without the will to speak.

Continue reading →

Masahiro Ando’s Shakespearean Epic; A Review of Blast of Tempest

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Here comes Matthew again, leaping to review another anime by Bones. I suppose that’s all I’m good for, isn’t it? And it’s directed by Masahiro Ando, no less…

Is Masahiro Ando my favorite anime director? He’s certainly up there with blokes like Takuya Igarashi. After all, Ando directed Snow White with the Red Hair, a show that I consider to be an empowering masterpiece of feel-good fantasy romance. Be it a drama or an action show, he is a talented director… though not without some missteps.

What I watched of Canaan never gripped me and reeked of a show whose potential was hurt by low-denominator tropes and poor writing. Under the Dog was an average pilot to a series that will never come out. And Sirius the Jaeger? More like Serious Disappointment (don’t hit me).

I would call Masahiro Ando the Brad Bird of anime. He makes some legendary stuff that will stick with you for ages, but he also tends to bat 50/50. It’s hard to tell why. Maybe it’s the source material on certain shows, maybe it’s other staff members, or maybe Ando is just inconsistent depending on the project.

I’ll cut through some of the snark and assure you of one thing, though. Blast of Tempest (or, Zetsuen no Tempest: The Civilization Blaster) is certainly on the good side of Ando’s batting average.

Continue reading →

The Best Three Anime on HBO Max

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

HBO Max is the newest and hottest service to make us ponder the costs and benefits of paying for another streaming subscription, and boy I am excited. Not because I plan on buying it myself for the foreseeable future, but because I know a lot of other people will and HBO Max just so happens to have a fair selection of anime.

Not only does it have a library of 21 Studio Ghibli films, including my personal favorite, The Cat Returns, but it also has a hub of select shows from Crunchyroll. 16 shows in total, which seems low considering how expansive their library is, but the selection they have brought over is… rather well-refined.

I’m excited about HBO Max’s anime selection for the same reason people are excited about some of DC’s content being on HBO Max. In the case of DC, many are happy that some of the better DC content recently such as Doom Patrol will possibly get more attention now that it is on a service that stands to be more popular than DC’s service, DC Universe.

Of course, I say this right after DC up and took some of those very same films used to hype up HBO Max off of the service right after it launched. Let’s just pray the same doesn’t happen with HBO’s Crunchyroll library and therefore invalidates this entire post.

Despite that, I’m hoping that this smaller selection of shows will gain traction and popularity. In that same vein, I want to name just a few anime from HBO Max’s selection that I think should be your top priority. I’m only going to name shows that I have watched though, so don’t be mad if I don’t hype up Konosuba like everyone else in the world has.

Continue reading →

Finally Watching Space Dandy in 2020

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

…

What the fuck am I doing?

The entirety of Space Dandy came and went in 2014, getting all kinds of buzz for all the right reasons. It was even fairly historical given that it premiered on Adult Swim in America before it even aired in Japan, with the English dub and everything. This was the beginning of the era of simulcasting and simuldubbing This show was a big deal.

Maybe about a year or two later I got the blu-ray of the complete series. And like any rational person who got a Blu-ray of a show, I watched a few episodes and then didn’t finish it until 2020… Seriously what the fu-

With Shinichiro Watanabe as Chief Director and Shingo Natsume as director, Space Dandy was a high-point for Studio Bones that despite the praise seems strangely absent from conversations about classics in the medium in recent years. It has the kind of recognition that assures that it will be referred to fondly, yet I feel like after watching, the expectation greatly differs from the actual product.

Continue reading →

Bungo Stray Dogs: A Novel Portrait of Good & Evil

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

How does one sanction evil?

The end goal of any traditional story of good versus evil is to battle to a point at which good has triumphed and evil has been defeated. The setting returns to or discovers a comparably peaceful status. From there, it can be assumed that peace will persist for as long as it can after the curtain has closed.

But what happens when a story paints that perpetual conflict between good and evil not as a disturbance or ongoing plague, but as the goal? Furthermore, what if a story progressively affirms it to be preferable to another, worse turn of events. While it may not be clear at first, Bungo Stray Dogs is the very thesis of this notion.

On the surface, this show is about the conflict between the simply named Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia, set in modern-day Yokohama, Japan. Every main character is named after and based on a popular author or poet, each possessing supernatural abilities based on their works.

Beyond the first season, the story evolves slowly into something far grander in such a way you might not notice it. It’s the kind of stylish show that could be unfairly criticized as lacking, narratively. My purpose in writing this is to parse the purpose of a story that I consider to be the very essence of character-driven storytelling.

[Spoilers for Bungo Stray Dogs Seasons 1-3 Ahead]

Continue reading →

A Review of My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Save for a rant-filled, canceled post from this past summer, I have never formally written on the topic of My Hero Academia. That might seem sacrilegious given my prior reputation as a Studio Bones devotee, but it never felt like there was anything to be said that hadn’t already been said.

It’s a super fun show given greater clout by its colorful cast and a uniquely relatable protagonist who goes through quite a lot of punishment to become the hero he wants to be. It has also been well-produced, taking year-long breaks in-between seasons to ensure a sustainable level of quality between arcs.

After a somewhat underwhelming third season (to me at least), the fourth season has been stellar so far, and high on hype from the last arc, I think everyone had high expectations for the new film, Heroes Rising. And to make a great year even better, those expectations were most certainly met.

Continue reading →

Kyousougiga and The Career of Director Rie Matsumoto

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

It says a lot when I can fall in love with a director after just one of their works. Rie Matsumoto stole mine and many others’ hearts after season one of Blood Blockade Battlefront. While at times her chaotic direction could produce scenes difficult to parse, I defend that she has a way of conducting a narrative unforgettably.

I’d always heard that there was one other show that she directed but I never got around to watching it. One day while walking through a movie store, I found a copy of a series that immediately caught my eye. Something about the art and its dynamic composition spoke to me and I thought it looked familiar. Sure enough, when I looked it up on my phone, there she was.

Kyousougiga, a Toho Animation series directed by Rie Matsumoto. Just recently I took the time to dive into it and get a sense of what an original work of hers looks like. Additionally, today I want to look at Matsumoto’s career past and present to get a better sense of her style and where she comes from.

Continue reading →

I Wanted to Love Fire Force

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

I have tried to watch Soul Eater on four different occasions and the farthest I’ve gotten is episode four. When I tell my friends this, they are surprised (for good reason). I have long been a huge fan of the works of Studio Bones, with two of my three favorite shows of all time having been made by them. I’m also a huge fan of sakuga and consider it to be one of the coolest things about watching anime. Most importantly, Takuya Igarashi is one of my favorite directors of all time.

That I was unable to get into a show applicable to all three above qualities is entirely explainable but still a head-scratcher. Especially if you’ve read any of my posts on Studio Bones in the past, it seems like a show I would love. The short of it was that the writing and characters did nothing to draw me into the show and I was somewhat bored.

But when I saw the trailers for David Production’s adaptation of Fire Force – another work from Soul Eater author Atsushi Okubo – I got excited. The artwork and music conveyed a darker tone and got me thinking that a different kind of story by the same creator might be more to my liking. Hell, it already looked like a show by Bones anyway and David Productions has been growing steadily thanks to stuff like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Fire Force quickly became my most anticipated show of the summer.

Now, as Fire Force‘s first season nears the midway point, I’m left a little underwhelmed. How did such a promising show fail to meet my expectations? More importantly, is it good enough to continue watching?

Continue reading →