Hromino

I have a great love for jazz, film noir is my cup of tea, and I can’t get enough of science fiction. So you might be wondering why I only gave Cowboy Bebop a three-star rating. It's a cult show that I recently rewatched, ten years after I first saw it, and it still didn't quite hit the right spot for me. I understand why it's a cult classic, especially in America, and how it became a gateway to anime for many viewers. I also see why Netflix didn't hesitate to produce a live-action remake after more than twenty years. However, in my opinion, Cowboy Bebop is a creative combination of good but not great ingredients. The episodic narratives are enjoyable, but they didn’t leave a deeper impression on me and quickly became forgettable. The show has a cool vibe, and the characters are interesting, but their character design can become overly generic at times. Additionally, the concept of a "modernized" Western had already been explored in Trigun at that time. While the show's accessibility to Western audiences is understandable, it comes at the cost of its Japanese identity, which is primarily manifested through the eclecticism of genres and themes. For me, the lack of a strong Japanese identity was somewhat detrimental. If you're looking for a show with a unique and bold Japanese identity, I highly recommend Samurai Champloo. It has even more advanced concepts, ideas, a fantastic soundtrack, and cleverly mixes Japanese identity with Western ideas compared to Cowboy Bebop. “Better” 3 stars.

This is the anime I had always dreamed of. Not because it takes place in Kawagoe, where I had a nice trip at once, and which brings back a lot of memories, but because it is an unassuming gem that gambled everything on a single card and succeeded. That card is believability. They bet everything on it: they threw away the popular tropes associated with high school romance anime, they threw away the typical character designs, and they threw away any exaggeration to which the setting of a Japanese school can create. To make matters worse, the production company decided to focus on the psychological side of the characters, and created a very serious coming-of-age contemporary romance that does not take place in high school, as is the case with other anime, but rather at the end of junior high school. They could not have risked any more - but a miracle happened, it all worked out. Together with a fitting soundtrack, and engaging artwork, a completely believable story unfolds over only 12 episodes, and with each passing episode, it never ceases to amaze you with its playfulness, freshness, degree of believability, attention to detail, the director's assuredness - and yet the finesse with which it is narrated. I understand that for a Western audience, believability can be uncomfortably startling: there are no eccentric heroes with strangely-colored eyes or hair, and instead of going off on some exciting adventure, the characters awkwardly engage in embarrassing school activities, and boring studying for entrance exams, they do not scream, they do not giggle, they do not behave like idiots, and the parents and teachers behave the way Japanese parents and teachers often do - in both good and bad ways. Many people may find the development of the heroes' relationship a little too rosy - but in my opinion it is more the result of watching other anime, where in accordance with the unwritten Japanese tradition they have to make the story as dramatic as possible, and throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of the heroes to show how much they have suffered for their successes, and that they have to deserve that happiness. These obstacles are also there, but there is a reasonable amount of them - and that brings us back to the beginning of my review. Again, I verified the hypothesis that Kishi knows how to direct anime, as long as it is not an adaptation of a video game. Until the penultimate episode, it looked like a strong 4 stars, but the end completely amazed me, and so I decided to definitely award it the full thumbs up. Watching this again in the future is guaranteed - and I'm already looking forward to seeing what other interesting details I can find. –– Edit: This anime reverberates in my memory so much that it simply has to make it to the top. Wonderful.

Anime that is basically just about a group of high school students trying to confess their love to each other? It may sound like corny nonsense, but my final impression of the show was surprisingly positive. The series is primarily a parody that successfully tackles various love story tropes found in manga and anime for teenage audiences, making it very entertaining. However, it also touches on serious themes, and the anime's producers do a good job of balancing both elements in such a short run time. The only major issue is the large number of characters featured in just twelve twelve-minute segments, which means not all characters receive equal screen time. If the producers had cut down the screentime involving the minor characters a little and focused on the more significant ones, the show would have been even better since all the major characters are engaging and entertaining. Overall, Tsuredure Children is an enjoyable standalone anime that's perfect for a bad day. My personal favorite couple was Takeru Goda and Ayaka Kamine.

Yes, we could have made a normal seinen anime for you, and it would have been beautiful. It could have had characters who were psychologically sophisticated, plus, an interestingly crafted vision of the moral decay in Japan, and then some ballsy action scenes. Only we said no. Deadman Wonderland is a prime example of an anime whose subject matter itself had potential, but then the creators completely squandered it and went down the wrong road, getting everything terribly wrong. I think that the main problem with it is that despite the mature subject matter, this anime is aimed at a teenage audience, but raises a range of issues that make my blood boil when watching such anime. First and foremost is the creators' resignation to attempting anything to elaborate on their vision of the future world. Nothing makes sense, including the behavior of the characters and their development. The heroes and villains are clearly black and white here, and you know that just by looking at them, because psychopathic outbursts, and pulling faces as sternly as possible is what all the real bad guys do, right? Once a character's tragic backstory is introduced, it is quickly dispensed with in the space of two minutes, and the characters' features are basically limited to the following four manifestations: cuteness, innocence, cruelness, and devotedness. The ratio in which you mix them together is completely irrelevant, because in the end all the characters are one-dimensional and completely idiotic. No one cares how prisoners could grow flowers in a high-security underground prison, how they could basically move around wherever they wanted to, openly rebel, even have their own bar (??!!). Also, how they could get strawberries and other food, and how they could obviously live a life very similar to the one they could live on the outside, where they lack nothing. The plot pacing is atrociously fast, with characters randomly disappearing and reappearing again throughout the story, but everyone and everything centers around the main hero. Is he in danger of death? Relax, just hang on a minute and someone will obviously come to save him. Prison officials having fun depriving prisoners of organs and limbs for losing a fight? Well, obviously just before the main hero approaches, they are still intact. Are we going to stage a revolt against the prison authorities? Then it is best to wait for the moment when the main hero arrives, that is for sure. Coincidences alternate with other coincidences and my head is filled with despair and boredom. I am giving one star more or less only for the reason that I reserve a BOO! for anime that is impossible to finish watching, and also for the excellent ending.

Death Parade is a beautiful example of how trying to develop a short piece of work into a fully-fledged television show does not always complement the original work. While Death Billiards was not exactly a top-class piece of work that made my suspenders burst with suspense and excitement, it was thanks to its excellently built suspense and mysterious atmosphere, short running time, and open ending that left the audience’s mind full of questions and was therefore quite cathartic. So, in that regard, Death Billiards stood out as a stand-alone work, and after watching it, I did not expect any sort of follow-up in the form of a fully-fledged season. Therefore, rather, unfortunately, Death Parade did not boost the value of the original work in any way. To my disappointment, the season follows a silly and, for me personally, a severely unpleasant pattern almost the entire time: throw in an as-yet-unseen game, and always choose two participants so that their interactions will cause the greatest possible amount of emotional outpouring on-screen, and to move the audience as much as possible. This of course entails showing over-the-top emotional outbursts as much as possible, shouting lines full of pathos, and would-be philosophical horseshit, which again is just a means to manipulate the audience’s feelings. I refuse to engage in such games with the production company. I am not sure if the original Death Billiards suffered a bit from being embarrassingly calculated, but if it did, it certainly did not suffer to this extent. Thus, only the soundtrack, along with the opening theme song, and the outstanding visuals are worthy of praise, which of course is not enough to make a season successful. Maybe it would perhaps demand more elaborate characters, psychology, a deeper story and for the repetitiveness to be kept to an absolute minimum? But alas, this is just a first-rate attempt to emotionally manipulate the audience by any means necessary. For the soundtrack, the artwork, and the good things left from the original Death Billiards, I give it a very weak 2 stars.

The title is a perfect fit. This is the kind of Death Race that none of us would want to enter, and we can count ourselves lucky to be at home enjoying some peace and quiet with a nice cup of tea and some buttery biscuits (which I'm currently devouring), while our boss isn't forcing us to take part in such a race.

Well, that was a rough ride. In my review of the anime series, I expressed disappointment about the declining production quality, and unfortunately, the movie continues in the same vein. Just like in the series, the comedic scenes are poorly timed and tedious, the characters are always screaming at the top of their lungs, and the male lead's repeated moralizing about how even the worst of the worst doesn't deserve to die becomes more and more grating. The first fight scene is a culmination of all the above-mentioned flaws and is the worst thing this show has featured so far. At times, I wondered if the genre of 'parable' should be added to the movie's profile, given how Tanjiro's kindness, purity of heart (portrayed quite literally and kitschily), and desire to save everyone basically turn him into an embodiment of Jesus. The pace of this scene is forcibly disrupted by cheesy dream sequences that aim to evoke emotions in a contrived way, and the animation quality noticeably declines (the CGI is especially bad). The relief from this ordeal only comes in the last thirty minutes, where the animators finally upped their game and created one of the most impressive animation sequences, combined with a satisfying fight and a final twist that improves the overall impression of the movie. Nevertheless, the movie leaves such a bad taste that it doesn't deserve more than a two-star rating.

I am awarding this one star for the fact that I was pretty well entertained as a very young kid. Now I am actually pretty much embarrassed by that. ;)

The biggest pitfall of the new Durarara!!x2, as it has been since the second half of the first season, is that all the subsequent stories and storylines are nowhere near the quality of the treatment of the initial story regarding the founding of Dollars. Although the audience’s hearts will flutter with nostalgia when they see the old familiar characters in old familiar situations after having waited for five years, they will gradually discover that the new endeavors of Takahiro Omori and co. in creating another complex story, have missed the mark yet again. While the amount of new characters has considerably increased, and plot lines are present in abundance, compared to the first season, I was not too impressed with the sheer tangle of storylines, and the faster pace of the narrative, which rather damaged the season as a whole, and gave me the impression that the creative team behind it have not managed to keep their work so tidy this time around. Some of the storylines and characters are somewhat underused (like Kida), so some of their significance fades away a bit in retrospect (Ruri for example), other characters have a lot of screen-time but the audience never really gets to know them, (e.g. Aoba, Izaya’s sisters), and this, as well as the poorer quality of the animation and artwork, is somewhat disappointing. I did not notice any new songs in the already good and well-known soundtrack, the opening did not impress me much, the ending, on the contrary, was very interesting.  Nevertheless, overall, it is an anime that I enjoyed despite the aforementioned shortcomings, and I was happy enough to laugh with my favorite characters again, although not nearly to the same extent as in the case of the first season. I am therefore curious to see how the July episodes build on this first run, and whether it will somehow make me reassess my overall opinion of the second season. So far, an average 3 stars.

With each new season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, you can be sure that it will surprise you both in a positive and a negative way compared to the last. With the fifth season, the most positive thing is the fact that it features a minimum of characters or references to previous events, unlike the fourth season, so if you are thinking of jumping into the middle of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure because you do not want to go back and wade through it from the start of the first season just to get the plot, Golden Wind could be the perfect stepping stone for you. Another plus is the change of scenery, where we are not stuck in Japan or Egypt and instead stay in sunny Italy the whole time, dealing with the mafia and of course a bunch of Stands. I also appreciate the fact that this season does not stand or fall solely on the main hero vastly outclassing the rest of the characters with his abilities, but their abilities are more or less balanced and they all have an equal chance to shine, which I give high praise for. However, now comes what I see as the biggest problem with this season, which is that it gives the impression of having been just going through the motions. Unfortunately. It does not really bring anything new to the world of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, on the contrary, it seems to contradict the rules of this universe - while in the previous season the use of Stands was presented as a highly selective matter for individuals who have something to do with a certain Arrow or are Joestar by blood, the events here give the opposite impression that every other Tom, Dick, or Harry could become a Stand User. Another sigh relates to the first half of the season when the creators fail to awaken the audience’s interest in the events that follow, and to offer a storyline that could arouse natural curiosity and hunger for further episodes. While this was something the previous seasons always managed to do in the first few episodes, this season completely fails to do so. The fights are dull, lacking in ease and ideas, and feel drawn out, or at worst, are strikingly reminiscent of some of the fights from the previous season, the bad guys lack any charisma, and overall the first half feels like a very weak concoction of the tried and true ingredients that JoJo aficionados have come to love. The second half thankfully rectifies this impression and offers a much brisker pace, more imaginative fights, unexpected twists, and, of course, a properly punctuated finale - it simply would not be Araki without a traditional final showdown with the main bad guy. What to say in conclusion? Die-hard fans will of course be satisfied with this season, and as the new audiences will not have anything to compare it to, they will probably appreciate it too, however, since I do not fall into either category, this is adding up to be the weakest season yet in overall terms. A completely average 3 stars.