Fantasy

Thank You, My Hero

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Warning: The following contains spoilers for My Hero Academia Final Season, now streaming on Crunchyroll. Some sections are more spoilery than others, so I’ll try to label when I’m diving into the thick of things for those who might just want my general thoughts on the season as well as the series at large.

This coming April will mark 10 years since the TV anime adaptation of My Hero Academia began at Bones Studio C, the same production house that gave us Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Soul Eater, and Ouran High School Host Club. And nearly just in time for that anniversary, the series has concluded its eighth and final season – the shortest, in fact, at 11 episodes. 11 episodes of dazzling spectacle, heartbreaking sacrifices, and monumental strides for its world and characters, and not a single week passed that the gravity of it all did not bring me to tears.

When it started, I was in my senior year of High School. I loved all the characters, I loved the animation, and I had a crush on Deku, because he was (and still is) adorable and ideal boyfriend material. Now I’m approaching my 30s, and despite the uncertainty of the future, for which this series’ text aptly latched onto as it progressed, I’m living my best life. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that My Hero Academia contributed to the heights of my life at this juncture, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that its whimsy has helped lift me along the way. It is a story that found me at the right time and grew with me, becoming more resonant than I ever expected.

Continue reading →

Bones Film and the Hunger for Longer Anime Seasons

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

So earlier today, I watched the new trailer for Daemons of the Shadow Realm, the new Hiromu Arakawa adaptation, and unsurprisingly, it rocked. Though crucially, I don’t believe it’s just because of Arakawa’s namesake. Don’t get me wrong: Fullmetal Alchemist‘s acclaim and staying power in the cultural consciousness are a testament to some wonderful writing, but they’re also inextricably tied to the artistry of Studio Bones. Frankly, if it weren’t Bones – oop sorry, Bones Film – handling this adaptation, I might actually be less excited, if only because few studios can evoke such trust in me by reputation alone.

Like, honey, look at the material. Mob Psycho 100? My Hero Academia? Noragami? Kekkai Sensen? Star Driver? With a resume like this, even something as huge as Fullmetal Alchemist is practically just a blip on the radar. Glazing aside, Daemons of the Shadow Realm‘s anime has only done itself more favors the more that’s been shown, and all from Masahiro Ando, the director of one of the studio’s greatest gems, Sword of the Stranger. Plus, with music by Kenichiro Suehiro of Fire Force and Re:Zero fame, it will probably be one of the best soundtracks of the season.

But none of that is what really caught my eye. I wasn’t even gonna write about it. If anything, I was planning on writing about Gachiakuta and My Hero Academia dominating this season (and I still might). No, what really caught my eye were the final words of the trailer: “Airing for two consecutive cours starting in April 2026”. It’s just a simple detail, practically obligatory, to disclose the release date and whatnot, right? Right… But somehow it felt more like the answer to a prayer. Cause like, has anyone else felt like anime seasons used to be longer?

Continue reading →

[Insert Joke About Trash]: Should You Watch Gachiakuta?

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Episodes 1-3 of Gachiakuta, now streaming on Crunchyroll.

I was gonna turn the title of this post into something like “This Anime is Trash” or something evocative of the central motif of garbage present in the story, but then I remembered that every reviewer on YouTube has already made that joke. I also remembered not immediately picking up on the joke and getting a little pissed, thinking, “What the fuck are these people smoking?” The thing is, it’s undeniably effective clickbait; it just already feels played out (not that my title ideas are any better, clearly).

To the surprise of no one who has read my writing before, I love Studio Bones. Their shows have consistently been among my favorites of all time, be they original projects or adaptations, and for over 25 years, they’ve been a shining beacon in an industry full of beloved studios. But sometimes I feel like I need to brace myself for the day when my favorite studio will “fall off”. I’m not getting any younger, and the same can be said of the artists behind my favorite works of film and television.

I think it was The Canipa Effect on YouTube who said that studios aren’t actually important. What matters are the artists behind the studio. When you get right down to it, it’s not “Bones” that I have to thank for my favorite shows. It’s the producers and founders like Masahiko Minami, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, and the late Hiroshi Osaka. It’s also Bones’ directors, like Tensai Okamura, Takuya Igarashi, Rie Matsumoto, Kenji Nagasaki, Masahiro Ando, and none other than Shinichiro Watanabe.

Of course, I say all this, but Bones still has that dog in them. Mob Psycho 100 is one of the most well-animated TV series of the past decade. Bungo Stray Dogs continues to be one of the highest-quality manga adaptations out there. My Hero Academia Season 7 was so good that I tried to nominate it for Anime of the Year at this year’s anime awards (albeit to no avail). Like, come on, they just announced a new adaptation of a series from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist. They’re doing fine.

The thing is, studios change. It’s natural, because the people working there age and pass what they know down to new people. Those new people might kick ass and bring the studio into a brave new era, and maybe those new people fuck it up. Most of the time, it’s nothing so clear as either one of those. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in trying to prevent myself from becoming a bitter old man or a stan that refuses to criticize something, I want to be more critical of Studio Bones. You see, it’s just a little tough, though, because so far, Gachiakuta is pretty fucking cool.

Continue reading →

‘The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf’ is the Best Entry Since ‘Witcher 3’

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. A rich yet depressive fantasy epic spanning multiple nations plagued by monsters and war. It’s a story about prejudice and choosing between greater and lesser evils. Amidst all of that, it remains a world that players couldn’t help but get lost in.

After the release of the live-action Witcher series on Netflix, the game saw a resurgence in interest from fans new and old. I should know, I was replaying it too. It was a quirky and often epic show that had its highs and lows, but despite it all, I loved it. News of new spinoffs and films were only natural, but was the franchise biting off more than it could chew?

If I had any concerns, they were minor, because Nightmare of the Wolf, the first of these spinoffs, was a film I highly anticipated. It came from Studio Mir, the studio behind Legend of Korra. Everything looked in place for this to be an enjoyable prequel centered around Vesemir, Geralt’s mentor.

And somehow, this film surpassed every expectation I had.

Continue reading →

[Context Needed]: 4 Controversial Anime From the Last 4 Years

/ thesakurasunrise / 2 Comments

The anime community is wide, varied, and growing all the time. Every couple of years a significant tentpole anime comes out that brings in a whole new crop of fans to the medium, whether simply to visit or make a more permanent stay within its bizarre and inviting lodgings.

And yet for as diverse as anime’s following may be as, you know, a medium, people are quick to resort to mob mentality and pretend as if the community can be divided evenly into two halves, or worse, that the “other” is so minuscule as to not even really be worth mentioning.

But if that were all that was needed to be said, I wouldn’t just be oversimplifying anime discourse. In all likelihood, I’d be oversimplifying humanity. No, anime is no stranger to controversy. Just as frequently as a new tentpole anime comes out to bring in new people, some shows kick all kinds of hornet nests.

[TRIGGER WARNING: The following post contains analysis of sexual assaults and other topics related to sexual violence depicted or hinted at in the shows that will be discussed.]

Continue reading →

‘Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?’; The Best Series You Didn’t Give A Chance

/ thesakurasunrise / 1 Comment

How many shows have you passed on because you figured they “weren’t worth your time?” What were the factors that contributed to that impression? Was it a lack of interesting marketing? Was it the style? Or did you buy into the narrative being thrown around that a show was “trashy”?

In 2015, I watched YouTuber Demolition D+’s video on the Spring 2015 anime season and delighted in his humorous appraisal of that quarter’s entertainment. The headliner for the video was Is It Okay to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, or, DanMachi as it would come to be abridged. Demo called it an SAO clone and I didn’t so much as bat an eye because I was laughing so much.

But then the second season aired in 2019 and friends who watched it told me about the show’s world and how it was actually pretty fun and that I should give it a chance. By this point, I’d already accepted that SAO wasn’t as bad as we all thought it was, so who was I to turn down an opportunity to prove my misconceptions wrong.

After watching all three seasons of DanMachi, not only am I shocked as to how anyone could have compared this to SAO beyond the leads sharing the same VA, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka. The art styles aren’t even that similar. More than anything, I’m angry that I didn’t watch this sooner.

This is DanMachi, my new favorite fantasy anime.

Continue reading →

You Need To Check Out This Monogatari-inspired Short Story!

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

My good friend, “Sad Scientist,” is an awesome writer and two years ago he wrote a short story called Scorpion Grass. It was a supernatural mystery set in Japan following two high-schoolers trapped in their school during the holiday break of Oban.

For two years the work went unfinished. Sci had made some changes on a whim and ended up erasing the original ending (happens to the best of us). Thankfully, I still had a saved copy of the original story, so he got to work editing it and perfected it. And now he’s created his own WordPress to publish it.

We all have our inspirations and Sci’s are works of modern fantasy such as Monogatari and the works of Kinoko Nasu (Tsukihime, Garden of Sinners). My love for modern fantasy is well-documented so I was all on-board. I encourage anyone looking for a good read to check out his work. Fans of Monogatari will surely get a kick out of it, and it has enough of an identity on its own that you’ll be itching for more when you’re finished.

Scorpion Grass, by Sad Scientist

Artwork by @MeltyDub on Twitter.

Thanks for indulging in my shameless plugging of my friend’s work, and as always, I’ll see you next time!

Castlevania Series Review

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Video game adaptations are almost always bad. The best of them excel only on the condition that you overlook large caveats, be they performances, the script, or how faithful the project is to the original. Video games are hard to adapt. You’re either trying to appeal to fans and alienating movie-goers or vice-versa. Both can fail depending on what is being adapted and how.

In the mid-2000s’, Warren Ellis wanted to make a direct-to-video animated film based on Castlevania. While the script was approved by Konami, the work ended up stuck in production hell for years. Adi Shankar, a producer who went viral with his “Bootleg Universe” series of fan-films, eventually was approached about producing an animated series based on Ellis’ script. While he turned down the same idea for a live-action film, believing live-action wouldn’t fit, he was more than happy to work on this one.

Opening Title Rough Animation by Spencer Wan

So eventually, Netflix adapted Ellis’ script into an animated series produced by Powerhouse Animation, an American studio. The first season – all four episodes of it – came out in July of 2017 and took the internet by storm. Everyone, myself included, was instantly clamoring for more. With the release of the second season in the fall of 2018, the show revealed even more of its potential with a longer season, more character drama, and even better animation.

With the recently released and certainly shocking third season fresh in our minds, it might be good to look back on the series as a whole thus far. It’s certainly the best video game adaptation, but is that saying a whole lot? Is Castlevania more than just the sum of its gorgeous animation?

Continue reading →

The Rising of the Shield Hero – Final Review

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote: Rising of the Shield Hero is 2019’s First Must-watch. It was a pleasant surprise to start the year, given how apprehensive I typically am about the Isekai genre. I was quite adamant about my excitement for this show after the first several episodes and despite the controversy, I believed it would be a total hit. I wasn’t wrong. It became one of the most-watched anime of the year and after its 25-episode run, a second and third season was confirmed.

Nearing the end of the year, as people begin reflecting on the best of the year, it bears asking if Shield Hero was worth the praise. Did it live up to its strong start?

Absolutely.

Continue reading →

A Review of Lord El-Melloi II’s Case Files

/ thesakurasunrise / Leave a comment

Worldbuilding is something I get unusually excited about when it is done a certain way. I’ve often ranted about shows like Kekkai Sensen, which depict the supernatural chaos, yet systems of government designed to efficiently counter the chaos. There is a multitude of minor elements of world-building that excite me but it is exceedingly difficult to put into words why. The closest I get is saying that I love the idea of order applied to an unnatural society

Kinoko Nasu, the creator of Fate/ Stay Night, Garden of Sinners, and Tsukihime, has written works tailor-made to cater to me. He has created a modern fantasy universe the complexity of which rivals the works of Rowling and Tolkien. In fairness, the Nasuverse is bloated, with so many alternate universes and different creative minds, but there is still beauty in the chaos.

This past summer, studio Troyca’s Lord El-Melloi II’s Case Files gave me this episode-to-episode joy built entirely on showing off how cool the world is. What I thought would be another misfire in an already packed franchise turned out to be one of my favorite shows this year.

Continue reading →