Spring anime premieres
Apr. 14th, 2024 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellLooks like I'll be watching Train to the End of the World, Yatagarasu, Tonari no Yokai-san, and Astro Note to the end of the season.
Train to the End of the World blew nearly everyone away with its first episode. Episode 2 was necessarily a bit of a letdown, since it had to properly introduce the supporting cast, and they're mostly just character types. I'm watching for the travelogue, the mystery of how much the missing friend has to do with ongoing events, and the very weird apocalypse. (Someone thought the Internet of Brains would be a good idea, or at least a profitable one.)
Tonari no Yokai-san (the title wasn't translated for the English market, but a very, very approximate translation would be "Supernatural Neighbors")is the big surprise of the season. It's about kids in a rural town in a version of Japan where mythological creatures are commonplace and integrated into human society. It's also quite casual about throwing dark notes into the story, so that it comes out as half supernatural Sesame Street, as kids learn about their neighbors and how to manage their big emotions, and half Night on the Galactic Railroad. It's the kind of show where a nekomata reflects that the biggest challenge of his new life is all the paperwork, and where a routine police investigation into a disappearance can end with "oh, it looks like he got sucked into the nameless void between dimensions, sorry, nothing we can do."
Karasu wa Aruji o Erabanai got licensed very late and only appeared on Crunchyroll yesterday as Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, so we got the first two episodes at once, but that's actually a better introduction since we appear to have two protagonists and each episode is about introducing one of them. This is very much going to be about beautiful costumes and court intrigue, and the protagonists are both likeable enough.
Astro Note is, at one level, a romcom about an amiable doofus with a dreamgirl within his reach being stymied by wacky misunderstandings. At another, it's about the princess of a distant planet sent on a mission to Earth to retrieve a crucial artifact and floundering a little because she's an intelligent and capable person but still learning about the society she's infiltrating. I decided after episode 1 that I'd keep watching if it leaned more into the sf elements, and did it ever. I was happy to see the heroine figuring out something immediately that some shows might require characters to take several episodes to work out, and the male lead... is bland, I don't really care what happens to him, but at least this isn't the kind of show that encourages men to do things that would be downright creepy in the real world.
As for other things I checked out: Wind Breaker had great production values but just wasn't that good; Kaiju No. 8, which is the big hyped shonen property of the season, felt aggressively dumb; Go! Go! Loser Ranger! has really amazing production values but can't decide whether to lean serious or silly, so it just winds up as a dull muddle; Mysterious Disappearances turned out to be the kind of show that introduces all its female characters butt-first or chest-first and where the male lead is an annoying jerk; Touken Ranbu Kai never got licensed; and Spice and Wolf...
Well, everyone who's a fan of the 2008 adaptation (it's based on a series of light novels) agrees that the new premiere, despite being practically beat for beat and line for line the same as the 2008 one, has inferior art and just doesn't work as well overall. But the real heart of the story is something it's yet to get to: Spice and Wolf is famous because it's an illustration of economic principles, or at least of how economics worked in medieval times.
Except it doesn't look much like medieval economics to me, because the peasants are apparently unencumbered by serfdom, and the merchant is apparently unencumbered by guilds, and so I don't have much hope of him encountering other interesting legal restrictions out of actual medieval history either. I'm much more disappointed by that than by the main characters not being very interesting.
Train to the End of the World blew nearly everyone away with its first episode. Episode 2 was necessarily a bit of a letdown, since it had to properly introduce the supporting cast, and they're mostly just character types. I'm watching for the travelogue, the mystery of how much the missing friend has to do with ongoing events, and the very weird apocalypse. (Someone thought the Internet of Brains would be a good idea, or at least a profitable one.)
Tonari no Yokai-san (the title wasn't translated for the English market, but a very, very approximate translation would be "Supernatural Neighbors")is the big surprise of the season. It's about kids in a rural town in a version of Japan where mythological creatures are commonplace and integrated into human society. It's also quite casual about throwing dark notes into the story, so that it comes out as half supernatural Sesame Street, as kids learn about their neighbors and how to manage their big emotions, and half Night on the Galactic Railroad. It's the kind of show where a nekomata reflects that the biggest challenge of his new life is all the paperwork, and where a routine police investigation into a disappearance can end with "oh, it looks like he got sucked into the nameless void between dimensions, sorry, nothing we can do."
Karasu wa Aruji o Erabanai got licensed very late and only appeared on Crunchyroll yesterday as Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, so we got the first two episodes at once, but that's actually a better introduction since we appear to have two protagonists and each episode is about introducing one of them. This is very much going to be about beautiful costumes and court intrigue, and the protagonists are both likeable enough.
Astro Note is, at one level, a romcom about an amiable doofus with a dreamgirl within his reach being stymied by wacky misunderstandings. At another, it's about the princess of a distant planet sent on a mission to Earth to retrieve a crucial artifact and floundering a little because she's an intelligent and capable person but still learning about the society she's infiltrating. I decided after episode 1 that I'd keep watching if it leaned more into the sf elements, and did it ever. I was happy to see the heroine figuring out something immediately that some shows might require characters to take several episodes to work out, and the male lead... is bland, I don't really care what happens to him, but at least this isn't the kind of show that encourages men to do things that would be downright creepy in the real world.
As for other things I checked out: Wind Breaker had great production values but just wasn't that good; Kaiju No. 8, which is the big hyped shonen property of the season, felt aggressively dumb; Go! Go! Loser Ranger! has really amazing production values but can't decide whether to lean serious or silly, so it just winds up as a dull muddle; Mysterious Disappearances turned out to be the kind of show that introduces all its female characters butt-first or chest-first and where the male lead is an annoying jerk; Touken Ranbu Kai never got licensed; and Spice and Wolf...
Well, everyone who's a fan of the 2008 adaptation (it's based on a series of light novels) agrees that the new premiere, despite being practically beat for beat and line for line the same as the 2008 one, has inferior art and just doesn't work as well overall. But the real heart of the story is something it's yet to get to: Spice and Wolf is famous because it's an illustration of economic principles, or at least of how economics worked in medieval times.
Except it doesn't look much like medieval economics to me, because the peasants are apparently unencumbered by serfdom, and the merchant is apparently unencumbered by guilds, and so I don't have much hope of him encountering other interesting legal restrictions out of actual medieval history either. I'm much more disappointed by that than by the main characters not being very interesting.
