Writing about Adventure Time’s fourth season last year, I described it as both “fantastic and slightly disappointing” due to its reluctance to continue to expand creatively. But if season four maintained the level of quality and creativity of its prior season, season five ups the game by embracing the show’s potential for melancholy and complexity…
Despite my storied history of nerdy pursuits, I’ve never really been a comic book reader. I’ve read some of the canon titles – you know, Watchmen, Kingdom Come, and, um, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics? – but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to educate myself in the medium, picking up some discount trades…
“It’s stupid to stake your life on table tennis. I just don’t get it. It’s revolting.” So says Makoto “Smile” Tsukimoto in episode three of Ping Pong, an anime about people staking their lives on table tennis. As this quote might suggest – and as its unconventional animation confirms – Ping Pong isn’t the sort…
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,…
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,…
This cumbersomely titled anime – called Noucome for short – has perhaps the largest gulf between potential and quality of anything I’ve seen. Its premise is absurd but laden with promise: the show’s protagonist, Kanade Amakusa, a high school boy, finds himself regularly faced with “Absolute Choice” – a set of options that he’s required…
The first season of Highschool DxD distinguished itself from its fellow fanservice anime series through sheer ambition. To describe it as an impressive artistic achievement would be an overstatement, undoubtedly, but in a genre that’s generally content to cobble together panty shots and inadvertent nudity into perfunctory, predictable plotlines it was refreshing to see Highschool…
If you’re looking for some holiday binge-watching to satiate your Game of Thrones addiction, Netflix have their fingers crossed you’ll turn to Marco Polo. The series–originally intended for Starz before Netflix and the Weinstein Company swooped in–uses its thirteenth century setting to present a historical drama that’s been widely compared to Game of Thrones. The…
Ghost in the Shell: Arise is a perfectly good anime series. Its four hour-long episodes – the first two having just been released on Australian Blu-Ray – navigate labyrinthine cyberpunk narratives layered with themes of identity and our perceptions of reality. This philosophical density is leavened by the show’s kinetic, deftly-directed action sequences and sharp…
Adventure Time’s third season represented an evolutionary leap forward for the show, taking Pendleton Ward’s template – a preschool mix of Dadaism and Dungeons & Dragons portioned out in eleven minute episodes – and directing towards experimentation and serialisation alike. The third season featured a range of episodes that deviated from the established formula of…
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