Afro Samurai
Series of 5 episodes (OVA)
Genres stretch from adventure, sci-fi, to fantasy, and action
This series was created by the studio GONZO DIGIMATION, and started airing on the 4th of January, 2007 and finished airing on the 1st of February, 2007.
An adaption from Takashi Okazaki's manga - "Afro Samurai"

Well, what can I say? It's such a clichéd story that nothing that this series has to present will surprise you. The predictability is just horrific. It's the typical "Evil unto evil" plot.
Basically, the protagonist is on a quest of vengeance, and no friendship, nor emotions will interfere with his ambitions or otherwise bloodshed, and violence will be dished out with no demur. Nothing will stop this gruesome resolution of this ronin of this series, Afro. Afro will not even hesitate to betray his childhood friends to reach his goal, killing Justice, the mischievous murderer of his father. Well, doesn't THAT sound familiar? The first thing that popped up in my head in terms of "simple storyline with sequences filled with one Hell of a slaughter feast and derogatory scenes" when I started watching the first few episodes was: Ninja Scroll. In spite of having a few sequences about the past of a few characters there is no depth in this story. Absolutely superficial. The glacial attitude of Afro towards each and everyone will, indeed, just make him look cool but won't really make the audience feel particularly attached to his existence. Albeit there is one character whose main purpose seems to be here to distract from the countless scenes filled with...Afro's silence. And believe it or not, with his annoying constant gibberish he definitely will manage to bring some comical atmosphere into the grey-sepia painted scenes. Quite clearly, this anime's purpose doesn't go farther than to unfold carnage and profanity; showing how violence is sempiternal and with this doesn't draw more than the eye to the screen.
No thinking required, it's all about getting absorbed into the well-budgeted slaughter feast with sporadic dialogue.

Speaking of animation, kudos to GONZO DIGIMATION. Richly detailed with smooth, lush animation. Groovy and funky stuff all over the place. The whole setting and pastel choice gives off a Sin City sensation; mostly dark scenes a la black and white that get disrupted by crimson coloured stains. The cell-based animation gives it a certain "comic" touch. The use of smoke and intangible fluttering of hair and what not was quite a delightful spectacle and the blending of traditional Japanese culture with Western lifestyle, to be more specific, Afro-American lifestyle; hip-hop even more so interesting. Full of funky technology and some sort of menacing antagonistic televangelists a la Ku Klux Klan. Pure visual entertainment.
Now that I think about it, the hip-hop blending with the world of Samurais reminds of an other anime, namely Samurai Champloo.

As for the sound, as previously mentioned, hip-hop is the main background music, Afro theme and Afro Outro, both by RZA aren't all that bad, but don't quite entertain me, but that's subjective. The voice actor, Samuel L. Jackson, doesn't a bad job at depicting Afro and Ninja Ninja, giving the whole series an urban flair by using street lingo, quite likeable if you ask me, but there wasn't actually that much dialogue so...nothing much to say..or complain about, so to say.

Overall, the hype over this series was rather gratuitous. The reason why it was such a commercial success was most definitely thanks to Samuel L. Jackson's name being cluttered all over Afro Samurai. There was no substance for story, yet I felt quite entertained by the fact that I could just sit down and enjoy the ongoing butchering on the screen without having to put much thought to it.
This show is all about ocular entertainment with an endless amount of action and gore. Perfect for every action lover out there.

Last Exile (ラストエグザイル)
Series of 26 episodes
Genres stretch from action, fantasy, to sci-fi, and adventure
This series was created by the studio GONZO DIGIMATION, and started airing on the 7th of April, 2003 and finished airing on the 29th of September, 2003. It was released on behalf of GONZO’s 10th anniversary.
 
Are you a fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s works such as Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and Porco Rosso? Were you fascinated by the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s work, namely Hidden Fortress? Did the dog fights and races in Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars I appeal to you? Then I highly suggest that instead of wasting any more time on this boring wall of text, you click on play and let yourself get engulfed by the laudable aero-naval battles the spectacular CGI and animation of this show have to present.
 
 
Now, for the remaining people who apparently still aren’t convinced enough to jump into the series right away, I shall proceed with my awkward literary style and grammatically disappointing sentences to create a nifty little thing called “Review”.
 
The reason why this series actually caught my interest was because of the many controversial ratings this show has received. People seemed to be intensely disappointed by its pacing, supposedly abrupt but ambiguous ending and the plot’s rather predictable nature...then there were those who referred to this series with sentences such as “will keep you hanging on the edge of your seat”, but one thing they all agreed on, they all seemed to be fascinated by the rendering of CGI and animation, scenery and character design overall. So I was all “Oh, now THAT sounds interesting” and after seeing a few screenshots I was all for it.
 
And after having watched the first few episodes I was left with an open jaw and glaring eyes. Yes, I was literally struck by the quality of the animation and that so much that I didn’t even remember whether I stubbed my cigarette out or just forgot to smoke it...did I stub it out? No clue. But one thing is for sure, for a series that was created in 2003 GONZO DIGIMATION did, indeed, create a masterpiece of its time. Epic blending of 2D and 3D; spectacular animation. Not to forget the effort they’ve put into every bit of this animation; very detailed.
 
The thing that I noticed quite quickly though, was that the scenery, costumes, and engines had a strong Miyazaki flair to them. Among Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Howl’s moving Castle it particularly reminded me of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Because both of these shows have a notable weakness for flying engines, bolts and so forth. A modern Laputa painted in gray-pale pastels granting it a rather dark atmosphere, so to say. This shouldn’t be a big minus if you liked Miyazaki’s creations.
Other than that, Last Exile is filled with 1700’s technology and culture; musketeers, nobles, peasants, steam-powered muskets (they use a liquid called “Claudia”), naval battles, etc. (Steampunk anyone?!) yet somehow all of this blended with elements of alienated nature.
The other thing that caught my eye was the character design. I was like “Oh, I saw that somewhere already..*thinks*..Oh yes, in Blue Submarine No.6 and in the newly airing series named Shangri-la.” so I got curious and went to check out who could possibly be the character designer for each series. Renji Murata. You certainly can’t hate this show for its character design....quite a pleasant sight.
 
Music and sound effects – pretty decent. The opening theme, "Cloud Age Symphony" by Shuntaro Okino, is quite appealing, and the ending song, "Over The Sky" by Hitomi, quite matches with the series' melancholic and serious aura.
 
Now coming to the story itself. It sure as hell isn’t the most original one, and similar attempts can be found in Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress as well as George Lucas’ Star Wars. It mainly takes place in the sky. People living on zeppelin-like airships, or those aircraft carriers you might have already seen in video games such as Xenogears’ Yggdrasil III, or in animes such as the Gekko from Eureka Seven, or the Imperial Capital in Samurai 7 or the Tiger Moth from Castle in the Sky.
Main characters are Lavie and Claus, both orphaned at a tender age, and then there are others such as Alex Row, an enigmatic personage a la Amon from Witch Hunter Robin, Alvis, a girl just as mysterious and who seems to be of immense importance, Tatiana, a la tsundere, Lord Dio and his servant Luciola, and then Maestro Delphine, the leader of the Guild, Dio’s mischievous sister who’s playing with the two kingdoms and its people as if they were mere...lifeless puppets or pets.
To put it short, each and every character is special in his own way, and I don’t think that it should be particularly hard to develop an attachment or at least interest whether negative or positive for some of them.
 
Whilst sustaining its mystery Last Exile isn’t the typical series where it would be detrimental if you’d miss out on one episode because it keeps each episode plot-wise rather simple and unfolds just enough development to flesh out the gist of the story. I wouldn’t exactly say that the story is easy to understand; therefore I don’t think that it’s a series for kids who haven’t yet reached that state of mind where they could actively participate in thinking and understanding. It’s more for the 13+ audience.
 
No nudity, nor gore yet full of intense battle scenes with stunning visual and sound effects. Definitely a must see for people who like stories and settings a la Miyazaki or are just generally curious about fantasy worlds filled with steampunk elements.

Lo, an other anime series I was interested in and finally managed to watch, and honestly, I can't say I disliked it. In fact, I pretty much enjoyed it till the very end and surprisingly finished it rather quickly, which pretty much should be a good indicator for my enthusiasm that was involved when it came to rashly click on the next episode just to see "what is going to happen next".

Anyway, I heard and read that a lot of people dropped this anime, or didn't enjoy it as much because the story was advancing in such a slow fashion that they dropped it even before reaching the second half of this show, or at least weren't as enthusiastic as I when it came to finish this series, probably due to the first half of this series mainly involving "stand alone" episodes. Well, true, the story development isn't as fast as some might have wished, especially for those who started to watch this show under the premise of it being an anime filled with action, mystery, drama, magic, supernatural, police and what not.
Oh, no, I don't mean to imply that there isn't any of the aforementioned genres involved in this series. Actually, they are all present there, just not the way it's being paraded in most popular anime series. This series definitely doesn't fall under the category of "eww, an other mindless action flick". And if you're familiar with Darker than Black, Ergo Proxy, Wolf's Rain, or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex then you might probably get a clue of what sort of story development I am speaking of. WHR is really mysterious, dark and occult and the complex episodes make their appearance only in the second half of this series, which of course doesn't make it any less attractive, peculiarly if you're into the aforesaid series, like the "Occult detective" type of plots and don't mind a relaxed atmosphere in spite of its essence being of rather dark and mysterious nature.

The story revolves around a girl who's a craft user and is part of an organisation that is meant to "liquidate" witches. It's basically a modern witch-hunting era, where people who are considered as "seeds", or do possess witchcrafts are viewed as a threat to the normal-human society and due to that are under tight supervision and whenever one of them breaks out of the norm they get "arrested" and brought away to a secret facility made for witches; prison so to say. The protagonist, Robin Sena, will throughout the time get confronted with some mysteries, issues about her own existence and powers, secrets concerning the organisation she's working for, and other troubles. End-to-end, she'll also go through some sort of metamorphosis personality- and emotion-wise. So will other characters such as Amon.

Relaxed atmosphere? Yeah, exactly. That's what I felt during the whole series apart from the last few episodes. I felt relaxed and I think this was ascribable to the characters' calm manner of moving, communicating. Other than the characters' behaviour, the other factor was the music. The music perfectly fit in throughout all episodes, and in spite of me not being a big fan of J-pop and similar stuff I found myself never skipping the opening song, Shell by Bana.
Kudos to the ones who've picked/made the soundtrack for this show.

Art. The art and animation is anything but second-rate. I was pretty much pleased with it. And I've still got the impression that it has something "Steampunkish" and Gothic to it..also, a lot of scenes tend to be quite dark, and the dark shades seem to prevail throughout the whole series. All in all, I grew quite fond of the character and environment design thanks to the decent scripting, and art.

Coming to characters. The depiction of each character is pretty much superficial as in, this story will reveal only as much as you need to know which is basically...almost nil. There aren't many intimate conversations going on between the various persona. Instead of cluttering your ears with endless emotional gibberish silence with intriguing glances accompanied by matching music tracks rules. Sadly, I've had sometimes the feeling that it was a bit too "built-on-the-surface" and that frigidity overruled them all, but other than that nothing much to complain there.

All in all, it's definitely worth watching. To me, this was a memorable and enjoyable show, and I'm hoping for a second season.

First of all, this anime series is anything but innocent in spite of its typical and slice-of-life sounding title. And it's highly inadvisable if you suffer from anger issues and are the type of person who'd smash your computer screen into pieces when something doesn't work the way you want it to.
Coming back to the aforementioned doubtable innocence of this anime's title, this story was based on an eroge, and as the definition of this word infers, one thing that you will definitely encounter in this series will be quite a few scenes with sexual implications and secondly, an untraditional character development. With this I definitely wouldn't recommend this series to anyone who still loiters in the typical romance plots a la Sailor Moon and hasn't yet discovered what the trope "friends with benefits" means and the humiliations that can be brought with it.

If all of this doesn't deter you from proceeding, then you're quite welcome to further with the reading. ;D

**Warning - may contain minor spoilers**

Anyway, this series turned out to generate an incredible amount of hatred within its audience, especially against the lead character, Matoko, like no other show I know. One of the main factors that made me quite curious about it and ended up making me watch it.

School Days is often put in the romance, drama, harem, school categories which I believe aren't really fitting. True, this show does contain a few elements of each previously mentioned genre yet I can't really consider those as fitting...Personally, I'd categorise it under "psychological drama" because of its gist being of utmost psychological and dramatical nature.

As for the art, you won't have to worry. The art is honestly good.

Coming to the plot. This story is revolving around three main characters. Makoto, of easy virtue and a sociopathic schmuck, Sekai, a manipulative bint, and finally, Kotonoha, an insecure shy and demure personality.
The story deals with the inhibition of the individuals' emotions, the restraint of expressing them, and the outcry for conformity that seem to be so built-in in Asian societies, particularly in Japan. Proof of that would be the indirect communication that is happening between the various characters particularly when the subject is touching the emotional and sexual aspects of life. Due to this suppression of the individual's basic urges to express himself and the issues that are plaguing his mind all the characters in this anime are, in fact, absolutely emotionally and sexually pent-up.

Regarding the high expectations that each and everyone has to meet up with to survive in Japan's social system then it's no big surprise that all of them seem to be so emotionally crippled. Makoto is faced with the problem of meeting up with the very high standards that are being set for Japanese men; getting good education, good job, found a family and of course being financially good off to support this all. But that's not all, the boys in this show seem to be under the influence of this cliche that is apparently quite widespread amongst males where a boy is considered a man only once he proved his manliness which is best expressed through sexual experience which seems to be the only option left to validate his existence as a man. And the fact that all the girls seem so willing to succumb to his sexual urges doesn't help either. But we can't blame them either, them being brought up in the typical Japanese fashion where the gender role is not to be disregarded and a woman shouldn't say no when it comes to the social obligation of satisfying the males' needs.

That's when a form of rebellion comes to existence amongst these characters, they express their desperation through unchaste behaviour, which is of course absolutely against society's criteria, ergo rebellion. With this having acted out of social norms hence they can no longer prevail as respectable members of that society which they realise quite quickly and the despair brought with this realisation leads to one dramatical bloody catastrophe which probably will satisfy a lot of viewers' expectations especially those who amounted an intense quantity of hatred during this show.
One bloody awesome ending, I must say.

I loved this show so much. Especially for the fact that it had such an intense psychological depth and prettily depicted the possible consequences that could possibly meet a member of society who acted outside of what is socially acceptable and didn't restrain himself from trampling over one heart after an other just to satisfy his urges. And, it gave one a quite respectable insight on Japan's social issues. This show represented all of this very decently.

Kudos to the creators of this anime.

Well, after having watched the recently aired 4 episodes of Time of Eve I thought I'd write a review, or at least attempt to do so.

First of all, this review may contain spoilers which isn't really my purpose but the risk stands there and if you don't feel like taking the risk of getting too much of an insight into this show which in turn might spoil it for you then it would be very inept for you to proceed with the reading of this review.

Anyway, I digressed. Back to reviewing.

A little insight on the art/animation. As one would expect, when the amount of time that's being invested into each episode takes more than one month, the quality is astounding. One thing that amazed me quite much is the play with the light, it's absolutely realistic and gives this show an ambience like no other. In fact, that's pretty much when one should realise that waiting around 3 months for each episode is the least one can do. Just speaking of the art, the quality of each long awaited release is absolutely worth the wait.

As for the storyline. The general concept of this very story isn't one of the most original ones as one might have already noticed after reading the anime's synopsis. Similar notions can be found in other anime series such as Ghost in the Shell, Magical girl lyrical Nanoha, Elfen Lied, and the hack// series, etc. Slightly different yet still all of them do have a similar gist. The ethical controversy of whether one should regard an android as a sentient being thus human, or quite contrarily not even consider such a possibility such as "robot = human" in the first place because of the logical presumption that those androids are unable of feeling and even less capable of actual thinking thus absolutely "inhuman" and therefore don't need to be treated in a more humane fashion. The discrepancy between humans and androids that has been invoked in the folks' mind is quite huge and most people don't have an issue with bearing such thoughts, but there are some who eventually start to struggle with that very idea, one reason for this might be the fact that androids look so humane and their behaviour has become, thanks to the improving technology and what not, quite humane throughout the years. In fact, that's pretty much the main subject of this ONA - A society where robots are considered as mere servants who are "Three Laws compliant", which was first introduced by the famous Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, and where the turning point becomes the "Zeroth Law Rebellion". I could go further into details but that would increase the chances for me to spoil it for you which I don't want to be blamed for, so I'll skip that.
So far, this sounds actually pretty unoriginal, now doesn't it? The thing is...the originality lies within its unoriginality and whoever is into sci-fi and the issues brought with technology and science will, indeed, be attracted to this show. But apart from that this ONA might also be quite appealing for people who normally aren't much into androidXhuman animes because this isn't like those mecha animes where robots were built for warfare. No, this is more of a futuristic slice of life so to say. A future that might await our coming generations where they'll be confronted with the same philosophical, moral issues, and where the "Zeroth Law Rebellion" could make its first appearance. The possibility is there.

Me being such a philosophy and sci-fi lover, I am absolutely fond of this show. And of course I recommend it heartily. To me, this is probably the best series that has been released in 2008. A must see for every anime lover out there!