Reviews and previews
Innocent Venus is an anime that falls into an ill-fated genre: Mecha. I’m not too big of a fan of mecha anime and the crappy cg that usually follows it. So is Innocent Venus guilty of such crimes, or does it successfully defend itself in the court of anime law?
So this anime first impressions post might be a little late for Keroro Gunso, which started airing in the Spring of 2004, but hey, this anime is really good! Plus there’s a reason I just recently started watching it again. It was reborn!
So I just read about this new anime called “Afro Samurai.” It stars Samuel L. Jackson as a Black Samurai who flips out and kills people for revenge. And he has an afro. Did I mention that I’m not making this up at all?
As most of my readers know, I’m pretty big on anime music. To me, OPs and EDs are almost as important as animation and story. A good OP can really raise my opinion of a so-so anime. A well done ED will convince me to stick around for the next episode previews.
There are quite a few artists who have become familiar to me through anime music. Sure, it’s kind of a cheesy way of finding new music, but it works for me! These artists have proven their worth as anime OP/ED singers (and maybe even as actual musicians).
Chances are that if they’re in the soundtrack, I’ll be more likely to keep watching the anime, if only for the music. Here are my top 5 favorite anime music artists:
So I mentioned in this post that I was beginning to feel more comfortable watching anime raw. Now that most of the new season’s anime has aired, I thought I’d take a look at each one and discuss how easy or hard it is to understand what the heck is going on.
One of the topics that we discussed in the Anime Nano Podcast was the demographic labels that are affixed to certain anime and manga. The four main groups are Shoujo, Shonen, Josei and Seinen. Shoujo is meant for young girls, while Shonen is meant for young boys. Josei and Seinen are aimed towards older women and men, respectively.
The interesting part about these labels is that unlike other genre labels, they don’t really describe the content of the stories, but the target demographic. Mecha anime will have mecha in them, and mahou shoujo will have magical girls. Naruto is a shonen anime/manga, but it’s labeled as such because it appears in Shonen Jump, a magazine for young boys.
So I’ve kind of had the Anime Nano Podcast in the works for a few weeks now, and I finally just decided to call up jpmeyer and Hinano and do it!
For this one, we used Skype and I recorded the audio with Audacity. The sound quality ended up being pretty decent. I think jpmeyer’s mic was waaay close to his mouth (or maybe down his throat).
Being the first Podcast I’d ever done (and hosted), I got kinda nervous. This seriously affected my Japanese pronunciation. You can hear it when I say “Ex-Fansubber Hitorigoto.” I can usually say stuff more smoothly (and correctly) than that. I’ll probably get better about it as we do more podcasts.
For this podcast, we discussed the recent Anime Expo 2006 Anime and Manga licenses. We also went through a bunch of the Summer 2006 anime and argued about the good and bad. Finally, we took a look at the genre labels of Shojo and Shonen, arguing why they’re kinda pointless now.
Many thanks to jpmeyer and Hinano for appearing and contributing to the podcast! Awesome job, guys! Let’s do it again next week!
Thanks for listening! If you have any comments or suggestions (constructive critisism is really requested), please lemme know in the comments section of the Anime Nano Podcast Blog!
So unofficially, I thought of Le Chevalier D`Eon as “that anime about the French crossdressing guy.” After actually watching the anime, it turned out to be more interesting than I had expected; in a good way!
Bokura ga Ita is an anime that’s been compared to Honey & Clover in style. With this information, I had deemed it a must watch! But can any anime really stand up to the awesomeness that is Hachikuro?
To me, a lot of what makes anime unique is the facial expressions that characters use. I’m kind of a sucker for these, and any anime that (over)uses them will usually get my vote. I thought it’d be fun to use the Summer 2006 anime as a case test for these expressions.