Hromino

Given is exactly the type of anime production that is needed these days. It is a very relaxed, adult, cleverly paced story about a band, in which music and drama play an equally big role. It is driven by well-written characters, who you will have no problem with, as their actions and profundity are very credible. Everything flows very naturally, and even with the way the story about the band and dealing with different generations works well together here. I was often reminded of Kids on the Slope, where I experienced similar moments of enthusiasm. So far so good, but why should there be more anime of this kind? I think it is mainly because it is one of the few positive exceptions, where a relationship between characters with different sexual orientations is depicted and incorporated into a story that is so believable, human and not a superficial tawdry representation. When someone tells me that there is such a relationship in an anime, based on my experience, I most often imagine a shallow, dull serving of thick sleaze for greedy fujoshi, which is intended to satisfy them exclusively through a gift-horse of sighs, adorable glances, moments of fawning and gentle or rougher forms of physicality between two or more boy actors. It is usually difficult to find any high-quality there, plus, if it were a heterosexual relationship, nobody would give a shit about such an anime. So it is pleasantly surprising that Given is not like those anime at all. It is a shame however, that some tropes were not completely avoided by the production company here - the male characters in general are sometimes a bit more physical with each other than in other anime, and the main protagonist's reticence combined with his cute cuddly crap and glances irritated me initially and made my face go red- but fortunately it gradually becomes clear that there is a good reason for everything and it is not just a fan service for female viewers. I give it a solid 4 stars, and it is a shame that the instrumental ending from the first episode was not left to play out more.

I would compare watching YowaPed to when someone puts small amounts of a laxative in the food you are eating, and then just excitedly waits for you to completely shit your pants. At the same time, the first third of the season looks quite pleasant - they sometimes poke fun at sports anime tropes we have seen a hundred times, and the main protagonist’s character’s naivety and over-the-top enthusiasm is entertaining, and his transformation from anime otaku to cycling otaku is really plausible, as well as his interaction with new co-competitors and the formation of new friendships. The second third of the season is in the spirit of preparation for the main race, being less comedic than in the first part of the series, portraying the characters getting fitter in an effort to achieve their goal. Here, however, the complete inability of the creators to build up any suspense begins to manifest itself, which is a fundamental shortcoming in the case of sports anime. The last third of the season is excruciatingly painful, due to the fact it is dominated by over-the-top and completely demented scenes contradicting (not only) the laws of physics, a cruelly slow pace, characters seemingly written after ten beers, who pull power-ups out of their asses, but they also lose or gain energy according to the whims of the screenwriter, and the audience simply does not know whether they should really stand for this, laugh at it, suffer or yawn with boredom at it. The day before the main race, the character is on a drip, and the next day they almost collapse again, but all they have to do is sing a song, and an 80-kilometer (?) race in the mountains is suddenly completely fine? There is a guy who has a fancy name for his left and right breasts, because he is in love with them, and lovingly chats with them in the middle of the race? There is a racer unable to overtake anyone from the left, just because in the past a rabbit ran into his path from the left … I could go on. In addition, the series lacks any real ending, and the story ends about 400 meters before the finish line (WTF?!) and the audience has to learn the results in the second season. If it was a straight-up parody of sports anime from beginning to end, my rating could have been something else, however, this was an altogether considerably tortuous anime, and lasted two and a half years - which was exactly how long it took me to watch all of it. So I am refusing to watch the next season, thanks, and only highly recommend it to all masochistic sports anime deviants.

What thrilled many audiences with its novel, fresh, and for many even shocking approach to anime, and basically earned the original  a cult status, simply could not be successfully replicated in 2018. Plus, the result looks incredibly stale. Perhaps it would not have turned out so badly if the production company had been only loosely inspired by the original, but here, unfortunately, they tried to reproduce everything they could think of as faithfully as possible: the same animation techniques for the plot narrative, and also for the dynamics in the action scenes, the same old soundtrack, the same over-the-top scenes, and a ton of sexual innuendo. However, this just does not work as a whole and the end product is appallingly tedious. The original FLCL was also really insane, however, first of all, with that I always got the feeling that the production company attempted to create an original name, and then tried to figure out how to make the scenes an interesting audiovisual experience. Here, on the other hand, all the over-the-top scenes look like they are just there for effect, as if they had first thought them up, and only after that a wannabe deeper meaning was tagged onto it. Instead of characters having well worked-out psychological make-up, and an interesting main protagonist, there is only a sort of perpetually annoyed emo-girl who takes center stage with her issues, and one uninteresting nerdy little boy we know nothing about. In addition, the art of skillfully teasing the audience with hints and symbols already disappears in the first episode where the producers awkwardly try to shock the audience by letting the teacher show her teenage pupils a porno. I finished watching the whole thing with frequent click-throughs, but it was a struggle. I give it a better 1 star, and I would rather not watch the third season.

In a way, My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected, reminds me of the Matrix trilogy. Not in terms of genre, of course, but in terms of the way it develops, yes: the first part is imaginative, entertaining and easy to watch, however, with the second part comes more philosophising and a significant change in mood, and the third part brings a conclusion that will mean downright disappointing for a large portion of the audience. My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected, is characterised by a plot that is covered by episodes largely set in a high school. It centers on the reflective and hard-bitten Hachiman, his sardonic comments and interactions with various schoolmates. The first season focuses solely on situational comedy, which is supremely enjoyable and intelligent, and features well-written characters. After that, however, it depends if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. The second series does throw away the comedic nature of the first season, the visual appearance of the characters changes, and the series becomes a regular coming-of-age drama, where, while there are still a few humorous moments to be found, the psychological development of the characters and their relationships takes precedence. In this respect, I can understand those who were disappointed by these changes, expecting another intelligent but simple piece of entertainment, and consider the second and third seasons as humdrum chatter about nothing. However, if you accept the rules of the game, and treat each season as an integral part of life’s great coming of age tapestry, as the characters gradually mature and realize what their priorities in life are as their senior year approaches, you can enjoy it immensely, as I did – including the ending. It is the final, third season that I consider in retrospect to be the most interesting season, and I can highly recommend the whole anime. I give it a better 4 stars.

When the opening credits are the most impressive part of a 161-minute movie, something is simply wrong. Enter the Void is a silly, primordially shocking and self-absorbed festival of nonsense, that is, to top it all off, excruciatingly long and painfully tedious. Everything it manages to impress with, happens in the first half hour, followed by almost endless introspection, with utterly ridiculous dialogues and a banal story, all wrapped up in psychedelic robes. If I use one simile in line with this movie’s content, I would compare watching it to a girl not wanting to get off you after mutually climaxing, and casually kept your dick in her hand, trying to pull you off for two more hours in the same position. Tedious as fuck! There is almost nothing to complain about the audiovisual experience in the first hour, but after an hour even that gets boring, and all the POV camera zooms, and the transitions become extremely repetitive and annoying. And last but not least, the potential that Tokyo as a location for a movie, with all the interesting aspects it specifically offers. is absolutely wasted here – the whole of Tokyo, or even Japan, is reduced to a place with a few neon-lit streets and nothing more, so the movie could have been set basically anywhere in the world and the result would have been exactly the same. Oh yeah, it is a severe disappointment. If Noé hadn't tried to turn this into an erotic drama with a nod to Tibetan Buddhism, and just made an unpretentious straight-up porno with a polished audiovisual look, he would have done much better. I give it a better 1 star.

Your Lie in April is an extraordinary cocktail about growing up, finding life-goals, friendship, music and goodbyes. However, it is a cocktail where, along with some great ingredients, some awful ingredients have been mixed in as well, and unfortunately in almost equal proportions. What strikes one first and foremost, is the imaginative portrayal of the main hero’s inner feelings, which are linked to his very successful, gradual and believable development. Aside from the main protagonist, one can also appreciate the successful chemistry between the characters and the excellent theme song in the intro, which I probably never skipped, as well as the hilarious ending. The road to the ending, however, is paved with an excess of completely silly, would-be comedy passages with lots of screaming and caricatured faces, which are so inappropriate they ruin an otherwise well-developed scene in an instant, then there is an unnecessary anticlimactic part with the piano prodigy, and above all unbalanced screen-time for the individual characters. It is a great shame that all the attention is focused on the main character, because if Tsubaki or Watari were given more screen-time, they might have not just seemed like one-dimensional appendages to the main couple, but fully-fledged characters in their own right. So, all in all, I give it 3 stars, with a complaint that basically only a few cosmetic changes would have been enough to improve the experience.

If you have watched all the classic sports anime and big hitters, and you have no idea what else to watch, then I could probably cautiously recommend Ahiru no Sora. It is a bit mediocre, and at times even a below average shonen in every sense, that could hardly get anyone excited, and it is about as far away from a basketball classic like Slam Dunk or even that stupid Kuroko’s Basketball as it can be. The story is completely nondescript, which would be forgivable in a shōnen if it could compensate for the story's blandness with excellently written characters. So, here is the biggest problem – in all that parade of mediocrity and insipidness, I could not find a single character that gained my interest and sympathy. With one character, it looked promising at first (Tobi), but even she soon disappeared into the other greyness. The second major problem is the animation. Sports anime has the misfortune of making it very easy to spot any inexperience in the creative team behind it, when it comes to creating action sequences. Ahiru no Sora is the emperor’s new clothes in this regard – the fights here are completely lacking in dynamism, they are basically just a series of more or less static images that are so awfully shot and edited that it is difficult to navigate them, and it is hard to pick out a scene that stuck in my mind. I imagine that if the Production I.G studio had taken over, it could have been at least a 3 star spectacle, but this way Ahiru no Sora reminds of drinking tea after the eighth or ninth infusion. I gave up after 15 episodes, not offended, not pleased.

The fact that the quality of KyoAni's audiovisual work is top-notch, is common knowledge in the anime world, and not many people would argue with that. That they are adept at delivering human dramas and psychological anime, is also something we have already seen, especially in their early productions. Sometimes, however, instead of an imaginative work, they manage to produce mere kitsch, and Violet Evergarden is an example of that. After reading the synopsis, it is very easy to predict how the story of the emotionless girl will unfold, but until about the eighth episode, this rudimentary plot is kept within reasonable bounds. It does smack a little of pathos at times, but that is not a major flaw, and it is the audiovisual experience and the successful fictional world-building that make this a fairly enjoyable show. Sometime from the ninth episode onwards, however, the great Mr. Pathos arrives and begins to mercilessly run amok. Holy shit, why does it all have to be so pathetic and contrived?! Wherever there was room for an emotional scene, the creators stuffed it in, wherever there was room for full-on orchestral music, they dropped it in, and as soon as Violet mentioned, for the fiftieth time, that the emerald brooch reminded her of her beloved darling’s eyes, or began to sigh pathetically at the sight of it over and over again, I was tempted to shove the brooch deep into the orifice of her excretory system. If you enjoy kitsch and watch anime because you want to be moved, or if the audiovisual experience is above all else, I can boldly recommend Violet Evergarden – this is definitely the anime for you. I can still taste the pathos in my mouth, though. I give it a weaker 3 stars.

This is a kitsch tear-jerker that relentlessly and mercilessly tortures the audience for over three hours with its relentless pursuit of maximum pathos. It uses New Testament parables, miracles, the supernatural, compassionate glances, and spares no expense with the large number and intensity of its clichéd characters. A miracle happened to me, too, and it was that I somehow endured the three hour running time, but only just. In retrospect, I can not help but marvel at how anyone could be moved by such a matchless piece of trash, let alone how it could be so massively popular... I understand that lovers of severely kitsch tear-jerkers may find something to like here, but for me, it rather reaffirms, again and again, that the adaptations of King's books, with the exception of The Shawshank Redemption, do nothing for me. For the performances of Hanks and Duncan I give 1 star, a higher rating is out of the question as I can not think of anything constructive.

The fourth season of Haikyuu!! is a prime example of how a change of director and especially of lead animator can play a huge part regarding the quality of a new anime season. In the light-hearted first half, this change has not yet manifested itself enough to matter significantly, but in the second half, the results of shaky leadership are laid bare right from the start. The original manga may be a guarantee of quality in terms of content, but after all the brilliantly staged matches at the end of the second and third seasons, it is hard to believe that the ping-ponging of a ball on display here should be the most important and consequential match yet, the outcome of which determines our team's continued existence or non-existence in the national tournament. Most of the second half feels like a slavishly and somewhat forced rendered imitation of the manga, unnecessarily slowed down by ill-timed flashbacks and noticeably lacking what was commonplace in the previous series – dynamic action scenes, well-set pacing, building a thick atmosphere, and, a direct hit on the audience’s goal. There is a noticeable improvement but only in the last two or three episodes, when the fight escalates to the finale, the pace and dynamics of the scenes increases and some moments are reminiscent of the best of the previous season, however, at the same time, there is a feeling of resentment at why the rest of the season could not have been like this. Overall, I give the better part of 3 stars, and perhaps naively, I have faith that the original creative pairing will return in full force for a fifth season.