The Perplexing Disappointment of Evangelion: 3.33 [You Can (Not) Redo]

I was a teenage Evangelion tragic. You don’t need to know all the details – we’ve all read enough white dudes futilely strive to define their cultural background through television/movies (see: every Star Wars review) – but my fandom consumed me for a while there. I read all the fan theories. Found all the fan…

Freezing Vibration (Season 2)

Freezing Vibration is the follow-up to Freezing, a 2011 fanservice anime which suffered from lacking any apparent target audience. Taking a conventional premise – a primarily female-populated high school spiced up with frequent magically-augmented battles – the first season failed to provide any kind of interesting plot, wasting its time on progressively tiresome hierarchical disputes.…

Log Horizon – Season 1

There are very few nerdy activities I haven’t partaken in at some point. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve beaten the Queensland State Champion at Scrabble. I’ve assembled and painted two Warhammer 40,000 armies. I’ve written Neon Genesis Evangelion fan fiction. I’ve played pretty much every prominent collectible card game you can name – Pokémon,…

Space Dandy – Season 1

It’s an empirical fact that Cowboy Bebop is one of the greatest anime series ever made. It’s also an empirical fact that one of its greatest episodes has essentially nothing to do with the show’s emphasis on its protagonists’ futile attempts to escape their dark pasts, nor of its core of existential loneliness: I’m speaking,…

Attack on Titan - Collection 2 (female titan)

Attack on Titan – Collection 2

From a consumer point-of-view, I’m always a little sceptical of staggered releases of television/anime series, where one season is broken up into two (or more) physical releases; on the surface, it seems like straight-up profiteering. But just as the The Deathly Hallows and many of its cinematic antecdents turned their bifurcated releases into artistic strength,…

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

“Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.” It’s hard to separate The Wind Rises from its creator, Hayao Miyazaki, iconic anime director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli. Barring a Jay Z-esque change of heart, The Wind Rises represents his last feature length film, and with this in mind…

Pacific Rim (2013)

Guillermo del Toro usually brings his own unique designs to blockbuster filmmaking; Pacific Rim, surprisingly, feels more like a pastiche. It’s visually a hodge-podge of Godzilla, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Matrix sequels, and is filled with overt references – there’s a Star Wars quote, and GLaDOS from Portal voices the film’s computers. The lack…