I watched Season 1 of this in 2016, but didn't keep the episodes. It's okay. Gently amusing. Friends do nothing much in a small town in the middle of nowhere, which usually means getting over-excited about traditional Japanese sweets. There's Hotaru (obsessive about sweets, buxom, optical-illusion eyes), Kokonotsu (schoolboy who's reluctantly running his father's dagashi store) and Saya and To (non-identical twins who run a cafe).

It's fluff that'll work better if you know what they're talking about. If you ate dagashi as a child, you're the target audience. (This excludes most Westerners, but there are Asian countries that imported these sweets from Japan.) If you know nothing about dagashi, though, you might find this relaxing and amusing (if you're lucky) or vaguely pointless (if you're not).

This episode's more of the same, basically. Hotaru goes mental about Big Katsu and pasta-style dagashi. I'm modestly fond of this show, but not enough to watch another twelve episodes. (No, not even half-length ones.)

It's funny, sharp and cynical, but also (deep down) sort of nice. Its main character (an actor called Takato) is a self-centred jerk and you'll laugh when the world annoys him, but he's also capable of giving a rival genuinely useful tips. Is that a weird kind of selfishness? Does he think someone else's bad acting would reflect badly on him?

Takato has been a top actor for twenty years. He started as a child star. He's been voted the idol industry's "Most Huggable" star for the last five years, he buys magazines about himself and he's up his own rectum. "I'm used to being the number one star, but it's tough being popular." "If you don't drive off your rivals and sometimes destroy the lead actor, you won't be around long."

Junta is a newbie, but he's just toppled Takato as "Most Huggable".

This is pretty funny even without the Boys' Love. The episode's bordering on consent issues, but I'd say it's fine because: (a) nothing happens to anyone who hadn't said "yes", even if Takato barricades a door at one point, and (b) what the hell, it's Takato. He walked into the situation, with his "down, peasant" attitude and his surprising carelessness with alcohol. I'd have laughed if his leg had got run over. (I'm not joking. That would have been hilarious. He'd have gone ballistic, blamed everyone and bitched about it for years.)

I was pleasantly surprised. It's funny and it portrays actors well. (Even the title's slipperier than it looks.) Maybe it'll go off the rails later, but for now I'm enjoying it.

My first impression was "otome reverse-harem show". One female protagonist (Ani) and lots of pretty boys. Apparently, though, it's a genre parody. Ani's too intelligent to be interested in all these ridiculous, useless princes. (The "dame" in the title means "hopeless, no-good", etc.)

The plot involves a peace treaty. Ani's the princess of Inaco, a "country" (town?) so tiny that it only has one knight. It could get squashed at any moment by its militaristic neighbour, Milidonia, so another neighbour, Selenfalen, has negotiated a peace treaty. Ani's going to sign this. That's an extremely important job. Unfortunately the negotiations go on hold because princes are being pathetic, whereupon Ani doesn't sort things out and instead just goes home again. Eh? Those princes include:

(a) Ruze, who only says and thinks what his Prime Minister told him.

(b) Narek, who's kind of brilliant in how far the show's pushed the trope of the narcissist. He's amazing. Ani's never heard of him, so Narek assumes that his beauty gave her amnesia. Comedically, he's a work of art. Dramatically, he's a waste of space. He can't think or meaningfully interact with anything but himself.

The show looks like a laugh. The reviews I've seen are fairly good too. However it'll require tolerance for flamboyantly stupid pretty boys, while I'm nervous of the episode's carelessness with that peace treaty. This show might be good, but what the hell. The world won't end if I skip this.

It looks okay, but not interesting. There's nothing wrong with it, though.

It's set in a tough, cynical modern world... with dragons, elves and magic. (There's technobabble about this. Mankind used an Event Induction Computer to create a space-time bubble, etc.) Our two main characters are dragon hunters who don't get on. One of them doesn't like killing 500-year-old magical creatures, even if they do eat people, while the other doesn't care and thinks killing is great.

The dragon-fighting is boring. After that's done, we have the dirty modern world and bureaucrats who don't want to pay for dragon-slaying. There's politics, an assassin, photographers and an elf newsreader on TV.

It looks competent. Decent enough in its sub-noir way. The supernatural elements fit okay. I have nothing against the show, but nothing about it says "must watch this". Even its first half didn't really interest me in its second half.

I was torn. It's the latest from Studio Trigger (who did Kill la Kill) and apparently it's about sex, underneath giant robot fight scenes. Sounds good so far. The reviews I've seen are scathing, but the tone could have meant: (a) me disagreeing with the world, or (b) a gloriously entertaining train wreck. It sounded interesting, at least.

When I watched ep.1, though... giant robots. Mecha fight scenes. Apparently they're beautifully animated, but they're still mecha fight scenes.

What else is in the episode? There's a timid teenage boy (Hiro) who can't do it with anyone until he meets an aggressive naked pink-haired girl with horns and absolutely no shame. ("Do it" means "pilot giant robots", but there might be subtext.) It's the future and teenagers have to save the world, but that's less cool than it sounds because they call themselves "parasites" and they have numbers, not names. There's a sombre little flashback with Hiro and a depressed Naomi, the two failures.

There's also metaphor. The teenagers are split into "pistils" and "stamens", while there's discussion of a bird that can't fly except in pairs.

To be honest, I wasn't left that enthusiastic. Giant robots. Huh. I'd have kept watching had the reviews been good, but you can't even rely on the "Studio Trigger" name. The animation studios were TRIGGER and CLOVERWORKS, but TRIGGER dropped out halfway through and the writer/director was from neither studio. Looking at the negative reviews, I think I'll skip this.

Even after trying two episodes, I couldn't decide whether or not to continue. I did so, on the grounds that I clearly had continued and I'd been going to watch ep.3... but I'm still worried about the show. I'm expecting garbage with mitigating factors. I like the latter so far, but I've just read an article called "What Went Wrong in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody?"

It's an isekai show, but the episode spends nine minutes showing us Ichirou's dull real-world job. He's a computer programmer. He writes fantasy RPG computer games of the kind he'll get stuck in. The "death march" of the title comes from doing insane overtime for a company with looming deadlines, a Japanese work ethic and a staff retention problem.

I liked this. It's quite interesting.

On entering the fantasy world, though, we discover a storytelling dichotomy. Ichirou's stupidly overpowered. The title sequence shows him running up cliffs. He takes about five minutes to reach level 310, with all attributes maxed out and a ton of skills. He's also filthy rich and has magical storage space that can hold infinite items, which themselves might have infinite capacity. He can leap like Superman and catch a girl who falls from the sky. It's hard to imagine anything slowing him down.

On the other hand, though, it's not just power fantasy. Quite often, in fact, it's a powerless fantasy. This world can be brutal. Ichirou gets trashed by one of his own spells. He gets rained on. Besides, he's constantly evaluating this world from a professional point of view, working out the game mechanics and understanding what's happened when a bug in the program zaps his magic items.

After finishing this episode, I couldn't tell what kind of show this was. Will it be an empty power fantasy without drama, or will it be a thoughtful exploration of living in this world? Our hero's usually on his own, so we don't even know how he'll interact with others. Clearly I had to watch ep.2.

To answer my question above, I think the show will probably be both. Our hero is god-level to his enemies, he can read anyone's game stats on sight, etc... but the episode wasn't about all that. He needs papers and a visa. (If he overstays, he'll be sold as a slave.) He has to learn the local currency. He visits a pub and orders mead. He observes that demi-humans get a bad deal here and helps two of them, although not in a particularly significant way.

I still think the show will end up being power wank garbage. Nothing could ever oppose our hero. However I quite enjoyed these two episodes, so I'll continue. So far it's mostly just a slice-of-life exploration of fantasy sociology and economics. I'm up for that.

Urgh. It guest-stars the Kaito Kid. I've seen my fair share of Conan, so I think I'll skip this.

(The Kaito Kid is a smug boy genius thief who in 2014-15 even got his own anime. In fact, technically, the Kaito manga pre-dates Conan, so it's the detective who's the spin-off.)

I'm ditching this one. DELETE.

"This is our Devilish Realm High School, set up to guide upstanding devils on their path towards world domination."

That's a good start. I wanted to see more. What came next, though, was CGI schoolgirls, having a conversation about how stupid they are. It looks appalling. The show's budget was probably about two dollars, including the script. What did the girls put on their career plan forms? One drew manga on it. Another returned it blank. The third provided a link to a website she'd made that was permanently down for maintenance.

They think about the future while looking at an idol magazine. "Let's become people who sing and dance and brainwash!" Hurrah for brainwashing! (Punch the air.) This is amusing at first, but it goes on and on.

The "devil girl" thing is funny. Its intersection with idols is intermittently funny. The show's unfit for broadcast.

Whoah.

I've seen almost all of Devilman, including semi-related stuff like Mazinger Z vs. Devilman, Violence Jack, Go Nagai World and his guest appearance in Cutey Honey. (I hadn't known about a 2015 OVA micro-series called Cyborg 009 vs. Devilman, but I do now.)

What's more, this is famously the Good Netflix Anime. They hired Masaaki Yuasa (one of anime's most interesting director) and gave him complete freedom to do whatever he wanted.

THE RESULT... loose and variable art styles. Punched-up characterisation for Miki. Soft-hearted Akira living up to the "crybaby" of the title. A drug party mega-orgy. Gore with a broken bottle, followed by demon action that in any other series would be the horrifying season finale. Naked demon breasts that bite off a man's head.

It's covering so much ground, both tonally and in plot terms, that it might well have sunk a less fluid, experimental director. It's remarkable. Even after only one episode, it's clearly one of the standout shows of 2018.

My first thought: "Is this a Chinese anime?" (It's not.) Vampires. No twist, nothing clever. Cheap animation. There's a pre-credits sequence of fangs, claws, falling bodies, pools of blood, dismemberment, grunts and groans. (And no dialogue.) Later, it's suggested that killing excites vampires to the point of semen.

It's as if anime never left the 1980s.

There's a serious girl called Tsubasa, with no boyfriend. (She's likeable, but doesn't have much personality.) However two boys will be attracted to her and... well, you can guess the SHOCKING PLOT TWIST.

The episode's watchable in a naive, retro sort of bloodthirsty way. If you had to guess the author's age, you'd say "fourteen".

It's the tail end of a 2016-2020 six-film series that's been broken up into TV episodes. It's a "many years later" sequel to Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02. That's a kiddie franchise, but this is older. The kids have grown up, unlike their cartoonish Digimon chums.

I've only seen bits and pieces of the old Digimon, but I've been watching all of this.

The main surprise this week involves Taichi/Hikari. They're siblings, but the creators had planted subtext to suggest that Hikari had unsisterly feelings for her big brother. This goes back to ep.21 of the original Digimon Adventure, allegedly, but I've watched that and the reading's bunkum. The two clearly have a strong bond, but anyone implying more than that doesn't know five-year-olds.

This episode is harking back to that alleged subtext. Hikari's reactions suggest that it's a bit less bunkum this time.

That said, though, far warmer and closer is the relationship of Yamato and his Digimon partner, Gabumon. They've "mated" for life. "If you get married and have a child, I'll help look after it." "If you become an old man, I'll be there for you." It's rather lovely... but are we meant to be inferring some kind of romantic and/or sexual angle there too? I'd guess not. (Gabumon's a knee-high dinosaur with a horn, a snout and a five-year-old's mentality.) "If you need me, I can do anything. I can even save the world."

There's some semi-apocalypse stuff. "Homeostasis has failed in the removal of Libra." Civilisation is vaguely teetering and an albino boob demon apocalypse monster is on its way.

The show's okay, but it's not as strong as I'd been hoping and the character designs are bland. Even after 22 episodes, there's a shot here of two identical-looking blondish boys from the named cast and I'd have been struggling to say which was which. (I'd have probably identified Always Squabbling With Taichi Boy, but it's like distinguishing identical twins.) I'm still watching, though, and the show's earned some goodwill from me.

It's a gag show. I watched Season 1 and it was amusing, but I can't imagine ever rewatching it. This episode made me laugh, though, and it's comfortable silliness.

Saiki is a teenage boy who can predict the future, read everyone's minds, hypnotise or possess them, teleport, turn invisible, see the dead, delete your memories, burn things, summon lightning, talk to animals, turn you to stone, reverse time, shapeshift, change gender, turn into an animal, see through clothes, control the weather or give himself any physical ability or superpower. Plus anything else. In some cases, whether he likes it or not. He finds this annoying and sees other people as a waste of time.

The episode's split into five segments, to reinforce the gag manga feel. (That's normal for this show.) The first segment breaks the fourth wall and talks about Gintama because both shows had a live-action film with the same director. (Remarkably, this isn't annoying, because Saiki makes anything feel normal.) We're reintroduced to the regulars. In the fourth segment, a purple-haired twat failing at tennis made me laugh. Saiki turns himself female in the fifth, but then has to avoid getting recognised by his female classmates.

It's an inconsequential show, but the cast's fun. I like glowing self-obsessed Teruhashi. Saiki's immediate zero-interest reactions can also be amusing. I'll continue.

It's better than I'd expected. I'd already seen a few Doraemon films, but I think that this franchise works best as short comedy TV episodes. Natsuki's a fan of the Doraemon manga, incidentally, which is plotless. It's just lots of independent one-off stories. (a) Doraemon Produces Weird Gadget. (b) Nobita Messes Things Up With It.

This week's two half-episodes are...

Doraemon's trying to stop everyone running off with his Lying Mirror. When you look in it, the art style changes to make you look like a twinkly dream god. The mirror even talks to you. It says you're the sexiest person who ever lived and that you'd look even more perfect if you mussed up your hair, squinted your eyes and scuttled along like something that lives under a stone in the garden.

Everyone in the cast swallows this. Not a brain cell in evidence among all of them. This was pretty funny.

The Lying Mirror was excellent, but this is merely decent. It's pretty good. Nobita gets a little toy shop that'll give you anything you want if you feed it coins.

This is a children's show, yes, but it's also good. It's one of the blockbuster Japanese anime/manga franchises, having lasted for a million years and a gazillion episodes. Maybe I got lucky, but I was impressed by what I saw here.

It's trying so desperately hard to be dark that its cast are idiots.

There's something called an SCM (Slave Control Mechanism). If you choose to put it in your mouth and then lose a game with someone, you'll become their slave. Furthermore, the winner will also be wearing an SCM, so they're as big a fuckwit as you and will be giving orders like "have sex with me" and "punch yourself hard in the mouth". (Those are actual examples from the episode.)

This is the kind of show where people in a cafe can joke about the couple at the next table... and later we learn that the man raped the woman later that evening.

Our heroine, Eia Arakawa, hears about the SCM and thinks it sounds good. (Idiot.) Later... "But I would soon come to regret meeting him with all my heart." What a surprise. How could anyone have guessed that all this might be a bad idea?

Also got a live-action film adaptation in 2014, called Tokyo Slaves.

It's from the creators of Tiger & Bunny, which I didn't find that great. This show isn't even as good as that one.

Our main character is Kirill, who's fairly obnoxious. He wants to be a hero, but he's graceless and hostile towards a neighbour who wants him to look for her cat. (It's true that it's his day off and not his responsibility, but he didn't have to be such a jerk about it.)

Doug, on the other hand, is a cool cop who gets a Self-Consciously Cool Moment by delivering a one-liner before shooting a baddie.

Not watching this. The disagreeing narrators provided some amusement, but the problem is that I'm not interested in Kirill.

What I saw of Season 1 can be summarised as excellent CGI, a refreshing lack of fight scenes and a punchable hero. Here, they've only "fixed" the first two of those.

Xiao Yan is touring the countryside killing bad guys. In one case, that includes murdering someone who's beaten, unarmed and lying on the ground. He's also still cocky and will mock the stutter of someone who's mentally enfeebled. (Okay, that's a baddie, but even so.) Every time I watch an episode of this show, he rubs me up the wrong way.

As for the CGI, the faces are fine but there's a problem with certain kinds of sudden movement and impact. Which is unfortunate since this has become an action series.

The episode's okay, though. If I'd liked Xiao Yan, I'd have had no problem with watching it.

I like Dragon Ball, but it's a shounen fighting show. Sooner or later you'll reach fighting. That's now happened, so... yeah. I fast-forwarded through most of this.

It begins with fighting. This is followed by fighting, which I think is a flashback. This resulted in Universe 3 being erased, which would have had more impact if we didn't know that death is temporary in Dragon Ball. Then, it's time for the final battle! There's an arena, with spectators including a Klepton and an Egyptian Cat God called Beerus.

The first eight minutes are okay. I watched those. After that, though, the arena action began.

WORRYING SIGN: it's directed by Shinji Higuchi, who perpetrated the live-action Attack on Titan movies. (I don't hate those, but they're a catastrophic brain failure regarding the required tone for the source material.)

This show looks great, though, and I'll definitely be watching it.

Hisone is in the Japanese No, Not An Army, Honest. (They call it the Self-Defence Force.) One day, she's transferred to the Dragon Division. They have actual dragons. Hers eats her. Then it eats her again. And again. Hisone isn't wild about this, but it's funny.

Hisone herself is also entertaining. "I've got a huge personality problem." This means she's got the social skills of a Westerner, but has a Japanese sense of guilt about it. She'll say what's on her mind, with no filters. However, she realises that that's inappropriate behaviour and at one point curls up and talks to herself about it.

The episode's oddly cute. The dragon looks like something from a kiddie show, but this is a military world of officers and fighter jets. Hisone is dutiful and obedient, but push her too far and you'll discover that she takes no nonsense. There's also a satisfying bit of science where they explain that flight helps dragons keep cool, which would indeed be a problem for anything with such a large body. (Dragons also get swimming pools to help control their body temperature.)

Children would love this show, but it's also an intelligent story about professional (or unprofessional) adults. It's cool and original.

It's amazing. It's like a bundle of all of its genre's cliches.

For starters, it's unclear that you'd call it a proper series. There was a 37-episode TV series in 2017, but this is an eight-episode web series to publicise a movie. Three of those were just recaps (including this one).

It's also one of those shows where the Japanese government depends for national defence on ten-year-olds in transforming robots. Drive Head is a police car that transforms into a robot.

"Not too far into the future, to deal with disasters beyond human understanding, together with increasing complexity and number of crimes and mishaps, the Mobile Emergency Police Hyper Rescue developed machines with police, fire-fighting and rescue capabilities. Drive Head jumps into various dangerous situations to solve desperate cases."

What does "disasters beyond human understanding" mean? Answer: it involves not telling anyone about Evil AI, Ark, a supervillain who's actively trying to destroy the world. Why? Because, uh, yeah, (whistle casually).

"We're still not going to announce that the cause of that disaster was Evil AI, Ark?"

"I guess not."

"If we did announce it, I think it could cause a lot of trouble for the world. People will be panicking because they don't want to die."

What would have happened if Evil AI, Ark, had started destroying the world somewhere our ten-year-old heroes didn't know about? Answer: no one there would know anything. Result: world gets destroyed. I want to see these children hanged as de facto collaborators. (Except Gou Kurumada, who wants to brag to his friends.)

EXCITING ACTION IN THIS EPISODE:

(a) Mikoto has a go at Gou for eating ice cream.

(b) amazing, thrilling adventures... that happened in the past are related in a recap of the Season 1 finale. This info-dump ends at the 13-minute point of a 15-minute episode.

(c) There's going to be a new Drive Head! "We must continually evolve!" (TRANSLATION: we need new toys in shops.)

Even the theme music is absurd. "Booby boogie" is the main line of the chorus, which would have described lots of other anime shows. (But not this one.)

Jashin-chan is a snake-devil trapped on Earth. She and her summoner/owner, Yurine, live together with two other satanic beings and a depressed, big-eyed angel. Five schoolgirls in a flat, in other words.

The show's gag is that Jashin keeps trying to murder Yurine, but keeps getting punished. This includes being chopped up for food, having her spine shattered with a crowbar, dismembered with a chainsaw, etc. (She always recovers, though, being a demon from Hell.)

That premise could be funny. I enjoyed Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan. Here, though...

1. Jashin is genuinely unpleasant, e.g. bullying the angel until even the other devils intervene to defend her. Presumably this is to stop us from getting queasy about the splatter. (Her villainy can be amusing, though. "Jashin-chan, you're thinking of something bad, aren't you?" "Yup.")

2. Jashin's murder attempts generally fail due to implausible stupidity. She'll say her villainous inner monologue out loud, for instance.

3. Fourth wall breaking. This can piss off.

There's a Season 2, for what it's worth. Presumably it was popular. I might even have watched this if it hadn't been for the fourth wall breaking. That said, though, I'd watch if crazy people ever did a live-action adaptation. Nailing the tone would be harder, but that would just make it more special if they succeeded. (Jashin-chan being a topless snake woman would be more interesting in live-action too.)

This version, though, is merely a bit silly.

I might have watched the wrong episode here. I'm not sure. There's so much of Duel Masters! and they don't always change the show's name. Anime second seasons often tweak a show's name, but this is just Duel Masters!. In 2017, they made lots of Duel Masters!. In 2018, they made lots more Duel Masters!. What I watched today felt familiar, but to be honest I'm not sure.

We're following a boy who looks about six. He might have a CGI dragon. You'll be tempted to draw a graph of characters' plot importance against hairstyle absurdity.

Someone walks through a purple hole in the air. It's a bridge to Creature World! Our hero follows and asks to drink something delicious. He requests flower water, but in Japanese that sounds like snot. He has a talking battery that can create anything he draws, which he uses to make a tiny man with a tap for a head who can drain flowers to death. That's where I started wondering if I'd seen this before.

It's fun, though. It's for children, but it looks imaginative and lively.