I watched a random episode on YouTube, by the way. It started with something that's both a drumming competition and an arena combat battle. I've actually heard good things about this show, but it is very shounen indeed and you might feel weird watching it if you had a double-digit age.

The premise is pretty mental, though. It's very colourful. Looks like a laugh, if you can stand watching a show that's built around shounen arena battles.

Still bad, still Netflix. If I decided to watch some Saint Seiya, I'd watch the real stuff, not this compressed, American-written, plastic CGI apology. This week, Seiya wakes up on a beach and has an info-dump conversation with a badly animated brat, then enemies arrive for a fight.

It's the second adaptation of the video game Sakura Wars, but the first one was twenty years earlier and this is a reboot, not a sequel.

The action opening is cool. Girls in amazing outfits fight on the roof of a speeding steam train in the snow. (The original game has an alt-universe 1941 setting.) One of them has wings and claws and can fly. Did I also see fangs? They also have a robot.

After that, though, we learn that these girls are part of the Imperial Combat Revue, a military unit dedicated to fighting supernatural threats against Tokyo while also putting on theatre musical shows. They sing! They dance! I fast-forwarded! They're also rendered in slightly dead-eyed CGI that would have looked good five years ago. I stopped fast-forwarding on hitting a scene that wasn't a stage performance, but then ditched the episode when someone said, "Every Combat Revue in the world must investigate!"

No, sorry. I like silly anime, but this (for me) is the wrong kind of "silly".

It's the world's longest-running animated TV series. When Tomoko saw me watching it this morning, she said that Sazae-san put her brain into Sunday teatime mode. I've never been blown away by one of its episodes, but this one was fine. Sazae and her daughter decide to try wearing kimonos and being ladylike. Everyone else in the family asks if they're okay and wonders if they'll be able to take the stress of this.

Our heroes are two research scientists. They start the day with their usual pedantic duelling banter... then Himuro drops into the conversation that she suspects she might be in love with Yukimura. He drops his nutrition bar in shock. I laughed.

This looked charming, but then our heroes decide that they should confirm the situation with science. What evidence do they have that Himuro is in love with Yukimura? They need to itemise and analyse it! I can see the joke, but I lost patience with it immediately. I found it hard to watch because their rigidly logical approach is in itself bad logic. They're approaching human feelings like a mathematical equation and counting up the number of times A appears in B's dreams, etc. It's like trying to measure your weight with a thermometer, or your height with a microscope. The approach to the problem is too stupid for me to be able to believe in the show's premise.

It's a big improvement on this show's first two seasons. I quite enjoyed it. It even made me laugh. I still won't be watching the show, though.

It describes itself as a "bystander anime", which means that the good stuff I want to watch (the magical girl parody) is sharing the spotlight with three teenage boys who deliver non-stop commentary on everything they see. I hate them. I want to see them fed head-first into a meat grinder. The good news, though, is that they've become less obtrusive. It feels like a magical girl show with three failed comedians in the background, not the other way around.

This episode has cool villain designs and amusing magical transformation scenes. I liked Blue's "sitting in a chair" one. I'd watch this show if it killed those boys.

I loved it, although it has some potential problems.

Firstly, Mazama Jin. He's a racist who hates the animal-people who are almost his school's entire student body. Humans are an endangered species. Ouch. However... (a) he's also an expert zoologist with so much knowledge that he's fascinating to watch when he's using it. He can calm an angry animal just with body language, or demolish a bully by identifying her species and its personality traits. (b) despite all his shittiness, he does help.

Secondly, there's some abuse for attempted humour. Since almost everyone in the show who matters is female, there are a couple of scenes that could have made different choices.

Thirdly, the inconsistency. Animal-boys are animals in school uniforms, while animal-girls are cute and look human-ish. They'll have at most some ears or a tail.

That said, though, I loved Ranka the wolf girl. She's got so much canine body language that the narrator has to explain its subtleties and wolf-meaning. She's also great. She'd be outrageous in real life, admittedly, but I admired her sincerity and never-say-die attitude even when Jin's giving her buckets of grief. She's got admirable qualities (e.g. fearless against half-ton bears) and they're all true to wolves.

I also liked the bear scene's resolution. It's not just one character rescuing the others. All three play a key role.

So far, I prefer this to Kemono Friends. Its animal characterisation goes deeper and there's a narrator to explain the most interesting details. It made me laugh. Jin's a dick, but he helps when it matters. Ranka's awesome. Oh, and the school's staff are prehistoric. I'm looking forward to seeing the show's version of other animals.

It's a big fight against a hairy old bloke who's so powerful that they start with flaming meteor strikes. There's a brief flashback to someone's past halfway through, but basically the episode's "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT we won! ANOTHER FIGHTER APPEARS".

I'm moderately fond of this series, but it's shounen adventure. It's always going to default to stuff like this.

It's less interesting than I'd hoped from the title. I'd been imagining a workplace comedy where the company's business was waging war. Everything would stop for tea breaks and the weekend.

In fact, though, it's set in a fantasy RPG world where people start companies to go dungeon-bashing. Our hero, Minato, is being pressured to inherit his father's company and its four employees. If he says "yes" (which he doesn't really want to do), then he'll have a test to pass!

At first, incidentally, I thought the employees were all female, but I was wrong. There a boy in there too. He just doesn't look masculine.

The rest of the world seems to have a low opinion of this show, but the episode seemed quite nice to me. I'm interested in the relationship between Minato and his childhood friend, who's going to talk formally to him from now on because he's the boss and she's the secretary. I liked them accepting a job from a small boy to pick a flower. I did notice that the "dungeon" was all overground, though.

It took me ten seconds to realise that I wouldn't be watching this series.

A crowd roars in an arena. "LUCIAAAA!!!!" roars a boy with anime hair (red), charging into shounen battle. "HIIROOOO!!!!" roars another boy with anime hair (white/purple), doing the same. They glow as if on fire. They transform into mighty warriors. They collide with a world-shaking blast.

In other words, the episode thinks its selling point is a meaningless fight.

Our child hero is called Hiiro and he lives in a world where no one talks about anything except the game Shadowverse. (This is real. It was developed by Cygames and was released for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows in 2016. In other words, this episode is a 24-minute advert.) I actually quite liked Hiiro, but we're soon getting dialogue like "I'll use my evolution points to evolve my Metal Elf Mage" and "the weak don't have the right to play Shadowverse."

There's a battle, of course. Hiiro offers the hand of friendship to a nasty boy he beats. It looks quite a well-executed example of its genre, but I'd be surprised to meet anyone over ten years old who watched this show.

The anime's just an insert segment in a live-action TV show, starring actors in full-body animal costumes. It's unremarkable kids' TV of a kind you might see anywhere. It even does that children's show thing of going out of its way to include minority groups, which meant "people in wheelchairs" in the episode I saw on YouTube. (It's educational and I approve, but it can feel a bit thudding if you see too many of these shows. It's as if half the universe is physically handicapped, deaf, blind, one-legged, of a specific ethnicity, suffering from cerebral palsy, undead, a cannibal or Satan.)

Anyway, the anime segment is Extremely Computer-Generated. Some animal-children play soccer with a girl in a wheelchair, who's the goalie and catches everything sent in her direction. This seemed a bit superhuman to me, although admittedly she's hardly keeping against Premier League internationals.

Yes, I watched it all. It's quite good, especially for something so short. Two small boys (Shirou and Akane) look for giants that their grandad said were real. Years later, they're teenagers and a bit more cynical, despite having always had little cute talking animal friends.

Giants appear. There are magical medallions, a transforming stone statue and an ice castle at what might be the South Pole. Grandad is cool. The "this isn't CG!" person is an idiot, but it made me laugh. For seven minutes, I think this quite an impressive little story.

I love Show by Rock!!. It was one of my favourite anime of 2015-16. Cyan, Retoree, Chuchu and Moa are my heroes and it's just irrepressible fun.

This revival, on the other hand, is... okay. I don't love it. The characters are fine, but unsurprising except that half of them are emotionless and/or disengaged. (But with amazing hair. Delmin has princess ringlets bigger than her body, while Himeko is a human marshmallow.) Ruhuyu the drummer is a geyser of enthusiasm, though, while our fox heroine Howan is thoroughly nice.

I'll watch it, obviously. They've toned down the cute weird CGI and I wouldn't call this latest season bizarre, funny or inspired, but it's more Show by Rock!! and so for me a must-watch. There's also a Season 4 in 2021.

Rikuo Uozumi graduated from university last year, but hasn't found a proper job yet. He stopped looking. He has a part-time job at a convenience store, is capable of being surly and says things like "I'm kinda sick of myself right now."

Haru Nonaka is eccentric and has a crow on her shoulder, but there's more to her than that. She likes Rikuo.

Shinako Morinome is Rikuo's friend from university. He loves her, but he hasn't even tried to contact her in months. He's never made a move.

It's intelligent and thoughtful. There's clearly a lot of dramatic meat in this cast, although the tone and pace are understated. I like Haru and Shinako, but the main character's Rikuo and at present he's both dull and frustrating to watch. Obviously he'll change and grow as the story progresses, but... naaah.

A demon lord captures Princess Syalis to hold her kingdom hostage! A hero sets off to rescue her, but the episode almost immediately forgets about him. Syalis can't sleep properly in a demon castle, so she decides to acquire and/or make a pillow, sheets, etc. At one point she considers killing her (cute teddy bear) jailers, then later she stalks the castle with a giant pair of scissors.

These demons are a bit rubbish. The jailers are happy to trade the keys for brushing. They also serve up quite nice meals. They're about to get eaten alive by their captive, aren't they?

I've heard that this show is funny. I wouldn't describe this first episode as more than "amusing", but I'll keep going.

Apparently the show's very good. A girl wants to be a fashion model. She cares about this a lot and tries really hard and... wait, wait, wait.

Fashion model.

Wants to be a fashion model. Naaaah.

There's nothing wrong with Smile Down the Runway. It's just not for me. These micro-episodes, though, are slightly less pointless than I'd expected, if you watch the "Chiyuki no Fashion Check" ones. She does a fashion analysis of various famous people, both real and fictional. These include Eren from Attack on Titan (ep.2), the protagonist of Reincarnated as a Slime (ep.4) and Chihaya from Chihayafuru (ep.9).

I love these people for giving some time to Chihayafuru, but I have no interest in what they're saying.

It's a dialogue-free exercise in visuals above story. It's the first 4K HDR anime, i.e. watching it made my computer unhappy and the audio juddered. It's a technical achievement, though. It took six people two years to make these four minutes.

Netflix is very proud of it, as per this quote from them on "The Importance of Sol Levante to the Anime Industry":

"With a run time of only four minutes, Sol Levante is filled to the brim with some truly visionary animation that was only possible because of 4K HDR technology. As an experimental piece of digital content, Sol Levante has been a grand success for Production I.G and the anime industry. The artists behind Sol Levante have made it abundantly clear that the next step for animation, especially for Japanese anime, is to produce content using 4K HDR technology. The ability to use 4K HDR allows artists to draw in detail more than was previously thought possible, pushing the boundaries of design and art."

Bullshit. The only significance of 4K HDR to a normal person (in my opinion only) is that it lets TV manufacturers sell a new product and it gives Netflix another thing to push in its adverts. Anime's made on a shoestring and junior animators are so underpaid that they tend to quit the industry. Let's talk about anime frame rates...

It's the kind of gorgeously realised setting that could be either SF or fantasy. Everyone and everything is weird. The main character is a sort of robot mummy whose head can split vertically to reveal a giant eye that can identify the structural makeup of anything. (It calls itself a golem.) One day, it finds a chained human child in the forest. Initially, I assumed the child (Somali) was female, but I later became unsure and it doesn't matter anyway.

Somali's main problem is that humans are thought to be: (a) extinct, and (b) delicious. Somali doesn't care and regularly runs off without Golem anyway.

It's nice. Our heroes will need to be careful, but Golem should hopefully be able to make up for Somali's lack in this regard. It's a fairly low-key introduction, but I'd be happy watching twelve episodes like this even if it never becomes exciting.

This franchise had 47 anime TV episodes in 1998-2000, but you don't need to have watched that to check out this. I think this might be a reboot, not a sequel, but don't hold me to that. This also got a sequel season in 2021.

It starts with a girl transforming into a dragon in a monastery. Sorcerors have serious conversations. That was promising, but unfortunately I didn't like the main characters. Krylancelo Finrandi (Orphen) chases and kicks two children who borrowed money off him, then later gets talked into an attempted marriage scam. It's hard to care about those children (Volkan and Dortin), though, because they're even scummier. (It's possible that they're dwarves or some other fantasy race, but they look and sound like children, so sod it.)

The show in general looks sort of okay, to be honest. I'd have probably kept watching if I'd liked the cast, but no.

Anpanman's been Japan's top-grossing character for twenty years. (He overtook Hello Kitty in 2002.) He's sold a ridiculous number of books, appeared on pretty much every possible kind of children's product, etc. (Also, a bit more distinctively, he's claimed the Guinness World Record for the highest number of characters in an animated franchise. Thousands of them.) He also boggles my mind. He's a superhero made of anpan and he gives bits of his head to hungry people. (His creator, Takashi Yanase, regularly faced starvation during WW2 and dreamed of eating anpan.)

This week, he meets Caramel Mama, who has caramel children living in her head. She opens her head and they climb out. WHAT THE HELL? She also gives people caramel to eat. I realise that this is normal behaviour in the Anpanman universe, but... what? Are those her children too? The episode starts with animals and food items playing soccer together. Then Baikin-man steals her children, but his female partner in crime, Dokin-chan, thinks they're cute and helps them.

Also, Anpanman is flying around with Melons Girl... no, sorry, Melonpanna. (Japan has "melon bread", but this traditionally refers only to their shape.)

The episode has two segments. In the second, Baikin-man tries to recruit a werewolf to the cause of not-very-evil.

It's a light-hearted break between seasons. Joyou and Himeragi wake up in a classroom at school, with no memory of how they got there. Himeragi is wearing a gym outfit, there's a bloodstained baseball bat in the corridor and Joyou has a large bra in his pocket.

The rest of the episode explains how things got that way. Because this is Strike the Blood, it will occasionally involve panty shots and girls getting their tits out. The gang get intoxicated on magic mushrooms, Yukina wants to watch Sayaka commit seppuku and Nagisa is found lying in a pool of blood that's actually ketchup. All that was entertaining, actually.

There's also a throwaway side story about some other characters on a ship. Blink and you'll miss it. Its purpose is to give the episode a fight scene. As always, this franchise remains entertaining and quite well made, but pointless.

Every time I watch this show, its backstory strikes me as dodgier than last time. It's an ALIEN INVADER!!! version of World War Two, in which mankind is the innocent non-aggressor and no one's to blame for real-life war crimes. The Neuroi invaded in 1939 and took over almost all of Europe! So they're not at all Nazis, then. Japan is nice, pure, kind, beautiful, etc. as are the rest of humanity.

...but they're the Fuso Empire. I repeat, empire. So Japan's 1930s empire-building hasn't been unhappened in the Strike Witches universe. The Rape of Nanjing? That was in 1937, so it's still a thing here, I guess. But the Fusou Empire are good guys and... ew. (Incidentally, I wouldn't be reacting like this if Japan weren't still today a home for right-wing war denialists.)

But never mind. This is a funny, happy, exciting show about schoolgirls vs. aliens. For me to be dragging in context like this is like doing Rupert Bear visits Auschwitz. Ironically, I'd just been watching the 2019 Take Off parody series, so it took me a moment to switch into regular Strike Witches mode.

Miyafuji's studying medicine, but she's got back her super-strong magic. She flies off to rescue a friend's father and forgets to take a gun. D'oh. Sakamoto will never regain her magic because she's ancient (i.e. over twenty years old) and so she's quit the Strike Witches and has joined the navy. Because of this, she's wearing trousers! In the Strike Witches universe! She's not showing her knickers. This is jarring and bizarre (although, in fairness, the show's long passed its early stage of creepy gynaecological panty shots). The other Strike Witches girls only appear in cameos, but I'm sure they'll be saving the day in ep.2.

It's Strike Witches. I enjoyed it.

The first half's nice and reasonably innocent. Hoshino and Retto used to be childhood friends, but for the last five years she's been an androphobe who doesn't even want to touch a boy's schoolbooks. She's clearly a kind, helpful person, but put a boy in front of her and she turns prickly.

All this I liked. Retto is doing his best and trying not to pressure Hoshino. I presume we'll be exploring her issues during the series. This is interesting, because on the face of it she's a straightforward tsundere... but the show's clearly deconstructing the character type instead of just doing it for hackneyed fan appeal.

The episode's second half then turns into a superhero show where the Earth Defense Force fights aliens that want to steal our sexy. Superpowers are fuelled by super-nudity. (This is actually quite clever, as a legitimate in-fiction justification for having teenage heroes. If horny energy is the greatest source of strength, then... yeah, teenagers.) All this is quite funny and I liked this too. The characters work. It feels like a proper storytelling episode that also happens to include sleaze humour. I'm quite looking forward to this series.

Crayon Shin-chan's dog Shiro is still secretly a superhero protecting the world. (A small, unimpressive superhero. He flies so slowly that it's quicker to run.) This week (ep.28), he decides to participate in a Muscle Champion Competition and cheats outrageously.

I quite like this show. It's modestly amusing, in a "for kiddies" way. Shiro gets blown up at the end, as usual, and even the end song comments on it.

The Alicization arc's been running since 2018, but we're into the last stretch now. At last, old favourite characters from the early days are starting to get into the action.

SPOILER is prominent. Also, SPOILER (who's very cool) fights SPOILER (who's evil).

It's very serious and epic. I enjoyed it a lot. Mind you, I'm surprised by the literalness with which they've drawn orcs as pigs. (It fits their odd decision to draw ogres as wolves.) Also, I didn't remember a certain location looking quite so Aztec, or at least South American of some kind.

Well, those aren't important. Watch Alicisation if you want to see a fifty-episode story arc done well.