Japan

Never been a fan of low quality harem shit/isekai but I recently gave in and watched Zero (the 2006 one). And yeah, it's exactly what I expected. Shallow storyline, mediocre animation, template characters, bland art style. And to think that this "genre" only grew over the years is saddening. I really hate how so many tropes are deemed necessary today and many shows seem awfully formulaic.
Even Goblin Slayer for example has the harem trope (i.e. all cute females being interested in the MC despite him having almost no redeeming qualities) for SOME reason even though its premise, world and animation should be enough to warrant viewers/readers. But yeah, apparently the usual anime fan can't consume the medium without tits and sex on their mind 24/7. Yeah yeah, I know, it's basically me saying "Stop liking what I don't" but I don't care. I think many shows would be better off without fanservice.
Sorry for that rant. Makes me sound like I hate the medium but I still like stuff even with the cheap tropes, it's just that I would like it even more without them because they feel like a cheap appeal.

>>3
I feel the same. It's the only medium I actually bother watching. So ironically, as a result I have many negative things to say.

Well, the industry has developed in a certain direction over the past decades and many things have changed; we have many more titles each and every season now, even though most of what airs is complete garbage, whereas previously there would be only a handful of shows each season, those would, for the most part, be of very high quality. But back then the anime studios had a lot more money to spent, things were less restrictive, and people would buy OVAs on video cassettes and such. Nowadays the medium has grown to be extremely shallow, in part due to the fact that it now needs to cater to a much wider (including Western) audience. But the good thing is that there are a lot a older shows that I still haven't watched or do not mind re-watching, so that's fine by me. But yeah, anime is dying, or so it seems to me.

>>>3
This might be an obvious/condescending thing to say, but just ignore things you don't like. Sure it's annoying but its good anime has the freedom to do stuff like this.
I also imagine media as expensive as animation definitely needs to be pandering to the lowest common denominator for a studio to make the profit.

Kumoko the spider isekai

Jahy ~ demon girl with 2 forms stuck in modern day Japan
Tsuki to Laika to Nosferatu ~ anime about a vampire cosmonaut

Nothing new, trying to find time for the last cour of Gintama, but I'm putting that off even as I type. There's a new Aria movie in December I think, so I'll watch that.

>>21
I lost my motivation to watch Jahy for 23 minutes at a time so I'm just gonna keep reading it. It's better in smaller doses anyway. The funniest part to me is that the creator made the smug loli and main fanservice girl the same person.

Komi Can't Communicate ~ romance-comedy about an average schoolboy helping the pretty girl overcoming her social anxiety

OVERLORD season 4

Best Anime Ranking 2022 by 5ch

No.1 Bocchi the Rock! 1031
No.2 Maid in Abyss - Golden Land of the Rising Sun 606
No.3 Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku 545
No.4 Akiba Meizu Senso 523
No.5 Heike Monogatari 456
No.6 That dress-up doll falls in love 441
No.7 Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witches of Mercury (1st season) 378
No.8 Summer Time Render 374
No.9 Lycoris Recoil 361
No.10 Cyberpunk: Edge Runners 352

Been rewatching Pokemon in Japanese.

Which one do I watch first for 2023.04?
Oshi No Ko (must watch)
Yuri Is My Job!
I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World
My Love Story with Yamada-Kun at LV999
Otaku Elf
The Dangers in My Heart
My Home Hero
Magical Girl Destroyer
Mashle: Magic and Muscles
Dead Mount Death Play
Kizuna No Allele
Heavenly Delusion
Skip and Loafer
Insomniacs After School
Hell's Paradise
My One-Hit Kill Sister
The Legendary Hero is Dead!
KamiKatsu

‘The Boy and the Heron’ Review: Hayao Miyazaki Has a Question for You

The anime filmmaker returns at 82 with the enigmatic tale of a boy growing up amid war and fear, much as the director did.

In 1944, when the future anime master Hayao Miyazaki was 3, his family fled Tokyo for the countryside, where they remained through his earliest schooling. Miyazaki’s father worked in a fighter plane factory, and young Hayao’s earliest memories, he’s said in interviews, involved war and fear.

Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki), the protagonist of the director’s new film, “The Boy and the Heron,” was born about a decade before his creator, but there are clear links between their lives. Three years into World War II, Mahito’s mother dies in the bombing of a Tokyo hospital, an event rendered impressionistically, as if glimpsed through a recurring nightmare. The following year, Mahito and his father — whose factory makes fighter planes — move to the countryside, where the widower has married Mahito’s mother’s sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura).

In the grand tradition of literary children sent away during wars, Mahito is bored and miserable in his idyllic new home, occupied by a cluster of chattering grannies who tend to the house. He’s haunted by the sense that he could have rescued his mother. Grief fogs the glass between dreams and real life.

That blurred distinction is a hallmark of Miyazaki, whose films (among them “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”) are windows into the subconscious. In interviews collected in the book “Starting Point: 1979-1996,” Miyazaki referred to a universal “yearning for a lost world” he refused to call nostalgia, since even children experience it. We long not for what we remember, but what we’ve never experienced at all, only sensed beneath reality’s surface. In dreams, yearnings break free, and Miyazaki’s films capture that exhilarating terror.

>>48
“Those who join in the work of animation,” he said, “are people who dream more than others and who wish to convey these dreams to others.”

Elements of “The Boy and the Heron” are familiar to Miyazaki devotees: a lonely child, the threat of violence (reminiscent of “Princess Mononoke”) and a bevy of fantastical, only sometimes cuddly creatures that externalize some part of the protagonist’s desires. Arriving at the house with Natsuko, Mahito spots a giant heron. “How rare,” she remarks. “It’s never flown inside before.” Something isn’t right out here. The grannies warn him away from a tower on the property with an apocryphal-sounding tale about his missing granduncle. But that heron (voiced by Masaki Suda) keeps appearing, luring him toward the tower, taunting him with forbidden knowledge. (Robert Pattinson voices the heron in an English-language version that features Christian Bale, Gemma Chan and many others.) Mahito’s mother, the heron claims, isn’t dead at all. After all, did he see her corpse?

Mahito’s grief is a focal point for a child’s anxiety in chaos, stability wrecked by the adults who are supposed to be in charge. Safety is not part of Miyazaki’s dreamworlds. The film is set before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the feeling of a world flying to pieces is destabilizing to Mahito. His terror manifests in his sleep.

>>49
Now 82, Miyazaki is so universally beloved that Studio Ghibli, the director’s animation home, didn’t bother advertising the film before its opening in Japan last summer. A brand unto himself, he retired with his 2013 film, “The Wind Rises” — then, changing his mind, returned. Magical, beautiful and uneasy, his films are beloved by children, but are certainly not just for children. With Miyazaki, the draw is subliminal, tapping an unsettling emotional well that seals over as we age.

Even by his standards, though, “The Boy and the Heron” is enigmatic, at least regarding plot. Better to watch as an exercise in contemplation than storytelling; this is the work of a man pondering life from its endpoint. It’s confounding, meandering through worlds that melt into one another. Magical fires rage, souls of the preborn and the dead mingle, and the fate of the universe is determined in ways unclear.

To tell a straightforward narrative, though, is not really the point. The Japanese title of the film is “How Do You Live?,” which it shares with a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino. The writer had been imprisoned for socialist thinking by a branch of the Tokyo police tasked with eradicating anti-authoritarian thought in music, literature and art. Upon release, he was invited to contribute to a series of books for young people, and intended to publish an ethics textbook to help youths live principled, freethinking lives. Knowing the dangers of such forthrightness, the series’ editor suggested Yoshino write a novel instead.

>>50
Thus “How Do You Live?” is more elliptical than bluntly instructive. Considered a classic today, it’s about a teenage boy named Koperu (a reference to the astronomer Copernicus) who struggles with change in the wake of his father’s death, while his uncle writes letters offering advice on the challenges his nephew encounters. The novel concludes with the narrator posing the title’s provocative question to the reader, making us a part of the story, instead of just an onlooker.

Though the film isn’t explicitly based on the novel, elements of Yoshino’s story surface throughout, including a rather Copernican-looking character late in the film. But the clearest link comes early, when Mahito finds a copy of “How Do You Live?” in a stack of books. He discovers a note on the flyleaf from his mother, addressed to him. He reads the book and weeps before setting out on his journey.

The references give the serpentine plot fresh meaning. “The Boy and the Heron” has few straightforward lessons to teach. Mahito learns he cannot save the world single-handedly, and shouldn’t try. Love and art, balanced together, are how a person can manage to exist without malice or fear. With that, it’s easy to imagine Miyazaki, whose life and work have spanned so many decades, implicitly turning to his audience, a single question in mind: How do you live?

The Boy and the Heron
Rated PG-13. Sharp teeth, sharp terror and even the cuddliest creatures menace. In Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed in English. Running time: 2 hour 4 minutes. In theaters.
The Boy and the HeronNYT Critic’s Pick
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Director
Hayao Miyazaki
Writer
Hayao Miyazaki
Stars
Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Takuya Kimura, Aimyon, Kô Shibasaki
Rating
PG-13
Running Time
2h 4m
Genres
Animation, Adventure, Drama, Family, Fantasy