The so-called “Fred Patten ideal” of anime (named for the first person to write about Japanese cartoons and comics in the United States) is not exactly dead as some would tell you, it is merely in traction and hooked up to an IV drip cocktail of dextrose… more »

Chohei Kambayashi’s Yukikaze opens with a squadron of fighter-bomber jets carrying out a pounding airstrike on an outpost of their mysterious extraterrestrial foes. The strike appears to be a success, until, seemingly out of nowhere, the squadron is ambu… more »

There isn’t a single thing about this six-episode Oriental Animation Video series that isn’t goddamned weird: a sequel with almost no recurring characters from the original property, animated by a different studio, a creative staff with almost no recurri… more »

I wrote the first negative review of a “mecha” anime on this blog. I will now write the second. Good Morning Althea, a one-shot Oriental Animation Video from 1987, is awful. The assumptive theory behind a one-shot is that a greater level of consistency c… more »

Arguing for political correctness in Japanese cartoons is a zero-sum game. For a sizeable, if shrinking, portion of Western fandom, redacting all the politically incorrect transgression out of anime is like making pornography with no nudity. What the hel… more »

I do not like the subgenre called “slice of life.” Oh there’s nothing wrong with the portrayal of the everyday mundane, but too often (read: almost every time) creators in virtually every entertainment medium pick up the name and heft it over their heads… more »

Looking at those lists of each season’s anime lineup you’d think there's some sort of ghastly creative brain drain bedeviling the entire Japanese archipelago. It’s simply not true. The reality is that there is a ghastly creative brain drain over all of J… more »