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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – PuraOre! ~Pride of Orange~

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Multimedia Project

Episode Summary: The members of the junior high embroidery club are used to turning their stitches one-by-one into small works of art. But when Manaka invites the other group members to attend an information session for the Dream Monkeys, the local ice hockey team, they start to discover a much different way of weaving together their various talents and skills.

The mastermind behind this beginner’s class is Coach Matsunaga, a former player and someone with high aspirations for the Dream Monkeys. Not only is she on the lookout for new team members, she hopes to incorporate a brand new form of entertainment into the games – having the team members perform a victory dance following their wins, thus turning each hockey match into a show. This goal seems questionable on its surface but it just might work; the members of the embroidery club, as well as a couple of students from a neighboring school, all seem interested in giving this new sport a try.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Tesla Note

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 13

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: From a young age, Botan’s grandfather has trained her as a spy in the ways of the ninja in preparation for a greater purpose to come. Much to her surprise, this greater purpose actually manifests and she becomes involved in “Mission T,” a quest to recover a set of crystalline shards left behind by the famous inventor Nicola Tesla 70 years ago. Time is ticking, however, and she and her somewhat-unwilling new partner, a spy named Kuruma must find these shards before they’re assembled into a full crystal and used for nefarious purposes.

This time-sensitive quest brings Botan and Kuruma to Oslo, Norway, where a train appears to have mysteriously warped from one point to another within the city, causing destruction and bodily harm. As Botan infiltrates the walled-off research area, she discovers the horrifying aftermath of the accident, including mutilated bodies and even a survivor who’s lost his wits. This put their team on the radar of the authorities, so they must make a quick getaway. This helps Kuruma to gain a little bit of respect for Botan as a partner.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: With the midcentury space race in full swing, the communist UZSR seems to be in a winning position. Having completed the first space flight with a living being aboard (a dog named Daly), they’re again tasked with reaching for the stars – sending a human being into space during a live broadcast. Such a thing would cement the position of the Union as the world leader in space exploration, but it comes with some complications; namely, that with such prestige at stake, any error would likely spell shame and death to those who had failed their country.

Lev is a failed cosmonaut candidate assigned to the top secret Project Mechtat, which aims to skirt by on several technicalities – namely using a vampire as their cosmonaut test subject rather than a human soldier. Irina, codenamed N44 and the vampire in question, serves as a test subject in this program. Biologically similar to humans, she becomes the vehicle by which stresses on the human body during space flight are tested, and if she dies in the process, well, she was only considered a test object by the standards of the program. Lev is ordered to remain emotionally hands-off as her handler during this mission, but despite the many myths surrounding vampires, he already finds himself focused on her inherent humanity.

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Conventions Special Features

Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness

And here it is, our final panel from Anime Fusion 2021. This one was primarily J.C.’s work, so the format is slightly different. It’s also a re-versioning of a panel we presented several years ago directly after the release of Rebellion, so we’ve had some years to stew on that (spoiler: both of us liked it) and now with a new movie on the way it’s opened the door to further speculation.

I hope that these posts have been helpful and interesting to people reading. I also hope that they help to partly explain my delayed episode 1 impressions for the past week and some days; we work really hard to put this stuff together and it ends up taking priority over other things. I’ll definitely be back with more reviews and such now that our (very weird) convention season is effectively over for the year.

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

The Odd World of “ODDTAXI” – Anime Fusion 2021

I’m back again with more panel materials! This time from our Sunday discussion of the wonderful ODDTAXI anime series. Like our Evangelion discussion, this is mostly a presentation to contain our discussion notes and to distract people from directly looking at our faces the entire time(lol), but it may serve some use to folks who are interested in the series. I’m writing this a day ahead of time so I’m not sure how many people are actually going to show up to this panel (I suspect probably the couple of people we know and that’s it, haha) but I hope it’s of use to some people.

I will note that there is a slide devoted to discussion of major end-of-series spoilers, but we don’t mention them directly, so if you’re worried about any final reveals this shouldn’t take that away from you.

For reference, you can check out my episode reviews of ODDTAXI at the link below:

ODDTAXI episode reviews

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

Anime About Anime 2.0 – Anime Fusion 2021

Good evening (or morning, depending on your time zone). Continuing with the onslaught of panel materials is our presentation from “Anime About Anime 2.0,” which talks about the anime production process as it can be gleaned from watching anime that takes place within that industry. We presented this panel a few years ago but included a few updates and switched things around a bit.

I’d like to note that neither of us is an expert on this topic; we’re both just interested enthusiasts. There are links in the source pages to places where you can learn more in-depth information about anime, its production, and the state of the industry and the staff members. But much like trying to get a sense for the Japanese language through watching anime, if you don’t make it your primary or only source, it can still be helpful for getting a feel for things.

Have you seen any of the series we reference in the panel materials? Let me know!

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective

Hello again, friends. Below is the PowerPoint presentation from our Saturday 2:00-3:00 panel “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective.” This is mostly just for some visuals to go along with the discussion, so unfortunately there isn’t a ton that’s useful about this outside of the panel itself, but you’re welcome to take it and read our notes (you can tell who wrote which notes because mine tend to be very brief and J.C.’s are much more coherent, heh).

What’s your experience with Evangelion? Have you watched all the movies yet? Are you excited about GKids’s release of the TV series on Blu-ray? Feel free to discuss in the comments 🙂

PowerPoint Slides

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Conventions Special Features

Shiny New Anime – Anime Fusion 2021

Hi All, I’m scheduling these posts to go up throughout the weekend as J.C. and I present our panels at Anime Fusion 2021. Our first is the ever-enjoyable “Shiny New Anime,” which includes a panel presentation and a hand-out. This should appear on the blog just as our panel is starting (there is an online component this year, so I wanted friends watching at home to at least have access to the handout right away).

Because the video clips will likely only play in a full version of Microsoft PowerPoint (as opposed to the online or Google equivalent), I’ve uploaded the clips into a separate folder if you really want to watch them and aren’t able to within the actual slide show. We chose our featured shows this time around based on both variety and wanting to bring some more focus to series that weren’t as talked-about or got lost in the shuffle (there was a lot of good anime this past year). Download Links are below:

PowerPoint Presentation

Clips Folder

Hand-out

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Uncategorized

Anime Fusion 2021

Hi folks, apologies for the lack of episode 1 review today (and most likely tomorrow as well). I spent most of the weekend with family members who were visiting, and then spent the last couple of days decompressing from that. But! I did want to mention that I’ll be speaking at a local, in-person convention – Anime Fusion, which is coming up the weekend of October 22nd-24th. My spouse J.C. and I will be presenting on several topics, since there were many programming slots to fill and we were able to update a few of our older presentations.

The Anime Fusion convention staff has recently posted the full convention schedule. A few of the time slots are livestreamed (denoted by bold text), so even if you aren’t local, you may still be able to purchase a virtual registration and see what’s going on online.

Below are our scheduled panels. If there are any panel materials associated with these topics, I’ll make sure they’re posted after the presentation is over.

Friday, October 22nd

9:30pm – 10:30pm in Panel 1- “Shiny New Anime” (Livestreamed)
Our annual-ish panel focused on new anime that’s come out over the past year or so. There was a ton of great anime over the past 12 months, so I’m still not sure how we’re going to choose where to focus our efforts for the short hour’s worth of time we have to talk, but I’m glad we get to share our tastes with everyone!

Saturday, October 23rd

2:00pm – 3:00 pm in Panel 1 – “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective” (Livestreamed)
Now that the final Eva movie is available and we’ve had time to watch it, we’d like to discuss the series as a whole (or, at least, the various animated portions of it). We’ll be talking about overall themes and what we liked/loved/had critical feelings about as it pertains to this important franchise.

11:00pm – 11:59pm in Panel 1 – “Anime About Anime 2.0” (Livestreamed)
A few years ago, I broke down series such as Shirobako and Animation Runner Kuromi and looked at what we could glean from them regarding the anime production process. In this revamp of the panel, we’ll be looking at a couple more new entries into the pantheon of “anime about anime” and move the discussion more toward how they reflect the state of the Japanese animation industry as it stands today.

Sunday, October 24th

12:00pm – 1:00pm in Panel 2 – “The Odd World of ODDTAXI”
J.C. and I talk at length about one of our favorite anime of this last year. We’ll discuss what we love about ODDTAXI, its themes, its extended universe (for example, the radio drama) and other things related to the series.

2:00pm to 3:00pm in Panel 1 – “Madoka and Homura: the Trap of Selflessness”
With the announcement of a new (final?) film in the Madoka franchise, as well as other peripheral franchise entries like Magia Record, we return to the discussion of Homura’s motivations toward Madoka, and the duality of selfless versus selfless love.

*whew* that’s definitely the most full schedule I’ve had to deal with in quite a while! Though I’m going to try not to let my general review schedule suffer too greatly, final convention prep is going to take the front seat over the next week before the convention, so apologies for any gaps that might be due to that.

Categories
Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – The Vampire Dies in no Time

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Ronaldo is the world’s premiere vampire hunter, so when he catches wind of a potential vampire-related kidnapping involving Draluc, a so-called progenitor vampire, he jumps at the chance to intervene. As Ronaldo enters Draluc’s lair, however, it’s obvious that the situation is not quite what it seems. The missing child has just been sneaking in to play Draluc’s video games, and Draluc is so weak that he turns to sand at the slightest provocation. Though Ronaldo tries to handle things as a proper vampire hunter, one thing leads to another and he ends up destroying Draluc’s home.

Now homeless, Draluc travels to Ronaldo’s agency and takes up residence there. As the two argue over the propriety of this arrangement, Ronaldo is called to handle another local vampire crisis, this time at the convenience store right downstairs. There, a wannabe vampire threatens a hostage. But of course, the situation is somewhat more emotionally complex and involves an unrequited love never fated to be successful. With the local journalists now aware of Ronaldo’s “arrangement” with Draluc, there’s no going back to being a one-man operation for Ronaldo.

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