Violet Evergarden: Best of Winter 2018

Many people followed Violet Evergarden episodically over the course of the last season.  I waited for the Netflix release and watched it in spurts of three to four episodes at a time.  This is a good thing, because I could not imagine waiting a whole week for another twenty minute chunk of this masterpiece.  If it were not for the rather complete ending offered by the first season, waiting for the second part would seem like an eternity.

Violet Evergarden excelled at many levels.  The animation was spectacular–easily the best of last season.  I loved how well they captured the look of Old World European cities for the backgrounds.  Besides being very detailed, the backgrounds did a great job of conveying the mood: whether of a bright, sunny day in town or a dark night of death and chaos on the battlefield.  The juxtaposition of war and peace in Violet Evergarden, the greatest tragedy against the great desire of mankind, makes for very powerful tale–as Leo Tolstoy also knew when he penned arguably the greatest novel of all time, War and Peace.  Violet Evergarden uses the interplay of these motifs about as well as I’ve ever seen in any anime.

Finding the Culture of Life in A.I.C.O. Incarnation

Here’s my latest post on Beneath the Tangles. It’s about A.I.C.O. Incarnation, the best anime you never heard of from winter 2018.

Beneath the Tangles

A.I.C.O. Incarnation found itself on my watch list very late in the season.  Netflix is one of the last video streaming companies I look at—especially since they sometimes stream an anime after it’s aired.  One nice bonus with Netflix, though, is that it has interesting options for a lover of foreign tongues like me: I can stream an anime with a English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, or Portuguese dubbing.  (That said, I still watch 95% of new anime in the original Japanese.)  Subbing purists may be horrified to learn that I gave the French dub of A.I.C.O. a try and loved it enough to watch the entire series in that mellifluous tongue.  Somehow, the anime of a biohazard threatening to destroy civilization and a girl trying to regain her lost family does not suffer from listening to the French dub—perhaps because the plot and setting diverged so sharply from stock…

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Tu-tu-ru! Okarin and Mayuri’s Better-Than-Romance Friendship

Beneath the Tangles

If I learned anything from anime, it’s that a childhood friendship is basically an invitation to future romance. This is a truth gathered from Love Hina, Skip Beat, Nisekoi, and…just about every other anime in which there’s a road toward such a relationship.  But in the Steins;gate anime series, things work a little differently. While it’s true that the childhood friend doesn’t always end up with the MC (see most of the above examples), Steins;gate goes one further: there’s barely a even a hint of romance between Okarin and Mayuri; the focus instead is on a relationship often neglected in anime: friendship between the sexes.

And the special relationship between Okarin and Mayuri is expressed in Steins;gate… as much as the original (spoilers ahead). Mayuri is always on Okarin’s mind. He values his other friends immensely, too, but Mayuri is on a different level. In…

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