The Dangers In My Blog

As we move forward into the Fall season I am thankful that the onslaught of shows I want to watch has subsided compared to Summer. Frankly I am not even done watching Summer anime as I have a few episodes of Ruri No Houseki to finish and most of City to watch. Ironically enough these shows ended up being my favorite of the last season. I always had a habit of trying to “savor” my favorite shows of the season so this ends up happening sometimes, especially this season where the amount of consecutive anime I was watching was the highest since High School.

Nichijou is one of my favorite shows of all time, so I knew City would resonate well with me, and indeed it did. It had the charm and expressively elastic humor that Nichijou had, with characters just as endearing and fun to watch. Kyoani has also always been my favorite studio and like all their projects, the care and passion always shines through, but man, some of these sequences were so impressive on a technical and presentational stand point. From some production notes I read it seems they worked closely with the original creator, helping bring to life the simultaneous havoc and quirky characteristics of the “City”. With extremely inspired animation and story boarding direction that lets the viewers loose into the boisterously chaotic going of the show while simultaneously containing it in a very neat and refined presentation that makes it so delectably digestible. A perfect mix of laugh out loud humor and a bizarrely relaxing slice of life atmosphere.

Ruri no Houseki was on my radar going into Summer because the PV really impressed me when I first watched it. It looked gorgeous with a unique concept, a show about mineral enthusiasts. The more I watched the show the more and more I was impressed, the amount of detail in every frame, the beautiful cinematography, layouts and background art. Even the limited movement in the show was portrayed in such a beautiful way. It actually put me in awe watching every episode, then you add the extremely endearing cast and couple that with their determined interest with geology and earth sciences and I really think something special was made. The beauty of the show really encapsulates the emotions and wonder the characters feel about their field of study. What seemed to be a very strong team of animators and directors, it was the surprise hit of this last season that surpassed almost all the bigger productions that was this season.

Of course Dress Up Darling season 2 was phenomenal, Dandadan was great once again, Dr Stone exceeded all expectations I had, and probably my third favorite show this season , Call of the night season 2 exceeded its previous season with flying colors. I won’t talk about all the shows since this is just supposed to be a short blog post, but I am somewhat glad the amount of interest in this next season has decreased.

That being said, I am watching 7 shows… Honestly some shows I am picking up for small reason, like Touring after the apocalypse I am watching simply because I love the abandoned civilization and nature overgrowth aesthetic, partially why I love The last of Us II and have their artbook, as well as why I own illustrator Mocha’s artbook. Similarly I love the work of Raemz and want to watch the series they illustrated come to life on top of the fact that Chitose is in the Ramune Bottle has Hina Youmiya (Yamada Anna) and Chika Anzai (Chisato Nishikigi) as leads in the show. Two shows, The Monster wants to eat me and The Mangaka’s  weirdly wonderful workplace seem like two solid yuri series, though tonally completely different. The former was actually on my radar cause I wanted to read the manga since the author contributed to the Lycoris anthology and I really liked her artstyle. Sanda is the new Science Saru anime which adapts Beaststars’ author, Paru Itagaki’s other manga. Looks super cool and Saru has been on a very consistent streak recently. Unfortunately it seems it’s only on Amazon prime, which I don’t really see myself subscribing to, so I will have to figure out SOMEWAY to watch it.  The last couple series are just sequels of shows I already like, Spy x Family and Ranma ½ . I also watch Kaoru Hana on Netflix which is in both Summer and Fall, as far as what I think, better than I expected, that is all so far (7 episodes in).

Top image is concept art for The last of Us Part II and the Bottom is Original art from Artist Mocha on Pixiv 

Hoping this freed up season allows me to watch some other stuff, I am in the middle of trying to watch all of the Gridman series and some of my friends have been nagging me to watch the Sopranos, so this is a good opportunity to get that started as well. With the end of this season, it’s gonna be really tough to think of the top ten of the year, but simultaneously it is very exciting that the amount of “best” is that high.

Small update: Just finished Ruri no Houseki, and wow what an impact it has left on me. I think as it stands as my anime of the season and year contender for sure. But I have most of City left so we will see where that ends.