This is actually a Fall 2022 anime review but then I realized that I only watched a handful of shows this entire year and the only 2 shows of note OF THE ENTIRE YEAR that I can think of came from the Fall season so... Happy New Year, here's my entirely opinionated and overconfident assertions of what's Good(tm). There's a couple of shows I've heard good things about that I didn't watch (Summer Time Rendering, Call of the Night, Lycoris Recoil, Akiba Maid War, Isekai Ojisan, Ya Boy KongMing, Mob Psycho Season 3) either from lack of interest or time (in Mob's case the latter). And I watched a couple of good shows that are pretty uninteresting to talk about, either because they're sequels or that they are just solidly competent without being anything notable (Tatami Time Machine Blues, Kaguya-sama, Demon Slayer, SpyxFamily, My Dress up Darling) - so I wouldn't call this post exhaustive nor well-researched, but since when has that stopped someone from vomiting their thoughts onto the internet?

So I guess the runners-up to the two shows that are my AOTY are Cyperpunk: Edgerunners, which was basically Studio Trigger saving CD Project by doing everything worth doing with Cyberpunk as both a franchise and a genre- namely, criticizing capitalism in the most emotionally devastating way possible; and Gundam: The Witch from Mercury for continuing Gundam's anti-fascist sci-fi legacy into the 21st Century, AND for finally making the franchise explicitly gay AF.

Anyway, without further ado:

Chainsaw Man

The Chainsaw Man anime adaptation is pure kino.

That's both a good and bad thing, so I need to explain. And to do that I need to gush about the manga now.

CSM's manga is, no hyperbole, art. Not some ironic postmodern conception of "comic book as art a.k.a the graphic novel" (although you could make the argument that it's a postpostpostmodern deconstruction, but we're just going to get high huffing our own farts)- I'm just saying this is a piece of media that's going to have staying power. That means something. That when future archeologists dig this thing up, they'll take one look and know what our entire deal is as a civilization, and probably why we ended up nuking ourselves or some shit.

They'll know, because CSM is a story about how much life sucks under late-stage capitalism, about how alienating and dehumanizing being divorced from the fruits of your labour is, how that breaks people, about the lengths the powerful will go to to keep this system of control in place by dangling the threat of everything being taken away from us unless we comply above our heads, and about how despite all this the one sliver of hope we have is the bonds we form with the people we care about.

In a lot of way's it's this generations Evangelion, although that comparison isn't exact.

And the manga manages that by leveraging it's medium in ways that are creative and genre-pushing, by doing things on the page that people genuinely haven't seen before.

So the question is, how do we adapt that to the big screen? And the anime's director's answer was that he wasn't going to.

The CSM anime isn't Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man as it appears on the page, because perhaps such a thing cannot exist on the tv screen. It's Ryu Nakayama's interpretation of the CSM manga- where he filters the manga author's love of cinema into cinema, putting the directorial lenses of Tarantino, Raimi, Fincher, etc. behind the camera- as a conscious, deliberate choice. Whether you agree with that choice is one thing (I personally don't, and probably all 5 other manga readers watching the show weekly on Hexbear didn't either), but I can respect it, and the resulting show is something that definitely feels different- animation as though it was live-action, cinema instead of cartoon- another ironic layer atop.

So this show was basically made for anyone sick of the usual anime bullshit. It looks and sounds good, and thanks to the source material it hits hard on really mature themes and doesn't sugar coat things. It's pure kino.

BUT! But, as good as the show is, it can't compare to the source material, in the way that the manga can let images breath and soak and stick with you forever, even when you put the book down. And maybe there was no way for any adaptation of CSM to do that, so props to the anime staff for doing their best and creating something just as valid and artistically accomplished- but if you like the show, please give the manga a read if you can.

Bocchi the Rock!

Where do I even begin with this.

I think going into the fall season everyone had written off this show as another moe "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" do-nothing slice of life marketed at that awkward demographic of both pre-teen girls and pedophiles, sorry, "lolicons". After all, "Manga Time Kirara 4-koma adaptation about a girl band" already conjures up images of K-On! and everything that entails.

But calling this show just another slice of life girl band show like K-On! is...

Ok, you know what? We start with K-On!

K-On! is a wonderfully comfy show about how you need to enjoy every second of life because eventually we all have to grow up and experience the bitter-sweetness of graduating from high-school. Everything is sugarcoated to hell and diabetes inducing, but that's fine because it was 2009 and we thought we had a future and life wasn't going to be this hard.

(This is also why racist dipshits put up K-On! profile pics on social media because they gravitate to that show's idealized version of the past, but that honestly isn't the fault of the show- the ultimate message is that we all have to move on. But right wingers aren't exactly media literate, so whatever. I digress.)

BTR isn't K-On! It doesn't sugarcoat things (for the most part. We're not getting to CSM levels of darkness, it's still a comedy about a girl band). It gets how terrifying high school actually is. It gets how hard wanting to make art is, how terrifying putting yourself out there is. It gets how lonely it can be wanting people to see you and love you, but at the same time being afraid of being seen because it means that people can hurt you.

The main character has crippling social anxiety. She constantly catastrophizes the worst possible outcomes over the simplest things. She can barely function outside her house, and she's really lonely.

And her dream is to be a rock star because she thinks that's how an introverted person like her can be popular and make friends, to the point where she practices guitar for 2 years in the hopes she'll get into a band because she's still a dumb teenager who clearly didn't think things through.

And yeah, that's the basic set-up of the show. It's the irony of her dream juxtaposed against her reality, and that instinct to laugh when we look in the mirror and realize just how cringe we are because otherwise we'd cry. And although Bocchi's catastrophizing is the lynchpin of the show's humor, it never punches down at her. All her fears have some grounding in some trauma from her past (real or imagined), it's just that her personality twists the worst possible outcomes into the funniest, most ridiculous extremes, and her growth as a character is literally about her fighting her own worst instincts. (She also doesn't miraculously somehow becomes "fixed" at the end, it's a slow painful process. But what she gains for putting herself out there is a support network of friends who love her for who she is and want to support her- and look, I know not everyone gets that support no matter how hard they try, but there's hope in escapism right?)

And the thing is- the people adapting the show clearly love the source material and are having fun, because they've poured everything into this adaptation. If the CSM anime is pure cinema, BTR is pure animation- they break out everything from live action footage to CG to a fucking 3d zoetrope to convey just how deep of a break from reality Bocchi is suffering through. And mixed-media absurdist meta-humor isn't exactly new to anime, Nichijou and Pop-Team Epic both did it before, but BTR does it's ironic shitposting in service to the story- which makes it's humour incredibly sincere.

But that's only half the story, because the other half is the music- because BTR is basically a giant love-letter to classic J-Rock bands like Asian-Kung Fu Generation, and the show goes above and beyond to portray the musical performances. You'll know it when you hear it, but you can basically hear each character in the performance reflected in their instrument musically- which wraps around into the story because each characters instrument reflects their personality and role in the story, and you can literally hear their individual character setbacks and triumphs as they grow as characters and as a band.

And that's it, that's why the show is so good. It's a neat little story about personal growth lavished with such incredible love and attention to detail that we as the audience know exactly what headspace the main character is in, and can empathize with her on an incredibly deep level, and laugh along with her at her own misfortunes, because her misfortunes are our misfortunes.

And there we go! If you're only going to watch 2 shows from last year, I'm personally recommending Chainsaw Man and Bocchi the Rock!

  • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    G-witch letting ppl rediscover OG Gundam :soviet-heart:

    Funny enough imo I think all Gundam stands on its own well enough, minus the continuity. But the 90s -2000s run (Wing, Seed, 00) which were the mainline shows most available to the west are also the weakest and where Gundam as a franchise got it's angsty anime bullshit reputation from... Which is a shame.

    (I'd go on a rant about how Gundam 00 is peak War on Terror brainworms but that's a story for another time)

    • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Same with G-Witch causing me to check out OG Gundam. Almost done with Zeta which I have liked so far (asides from the sexism)

      • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm honestly so glad G-Witch has made new fans. You've got a pretty clear run of good shows all the way till Turn A and late UC (Unicorn and Hathaway are :quagsire-pog: )

        • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I'm almost done with Zeta and I am going to go through ZZ. I know it is more comedic at first. I might take a bit of a break before I start ZZ to catch up on some other stuff. I might check out some of the AU stuff, but I know that they definitely aren't as good. Hopefully G-Witch keeps this quality. I do think that IBO sounds really cool.

    • Cromalin [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      i'll get there eventually. i'm listening to the great gundam project and though i'm only on zeta i've read a bunch of the later episodes descriptions, and they've sound completely miserable for most of the last few years, minus when they covered turn a and some of the spinoffs from that timeframe

      so at least i'll have that to look forward to

      • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        Thank god Iron Blooded Orphans course corrected enough that we got G-Witch.

        • Cromalin [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          yeah, i'm not looking forward to that nadir, i might just skip a bunch of the non uc stuff tbh

          • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
            hexagon
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            After Turn A you might as well just skip to IBO, unless you really have a lot of nostalgia for the 90's. Quick AU rundown:

            Turn A - Tomino's masterpiece. Culmination of everything he, as a director, was working towards. Peak Sci-fi.

            G-Gundam - Even more goofy fun, but it's basically "Super Robot Tournament Arc" the anime. If you came to Gundam for the political commentary, it doesn't have much of that beyond the world-building.

            Wing - Goofy fun, but incoherent and melodramatic. Basically the protagonists are the IRA. Yeah that's about it.

            Seed - Mid. It's just a remake of the OG, except it needs to pander to 2000's animation sensibilities (so lots of fanservice, the bad kind) and the politics become this liberal mishmash of "war is bad, pacifism good" that misses the point. They try to Zeta Gundam it with a sequel (Seed Destiny) and fail miserably.

            00 - Ok, so 00 is kinda fascinating. Production-wise it's probably one of the most beautiful Gundams ever made. Writing-wise..... well, basically it starts from the premise "What if 9/11 was justified?" which has potential for a really interesting story in something that seriously examines that premise. 00 does not. So, yeah, it kinda unfolds in a slow-motion trainwreck lol. This is the only piece of media I'd ever let myself hate-watch.

            Age - Overly ambitious, with different creative impetuses clashing to make something pretty incoherent. I couldn't get past the first episode because I kept feeling like my intelligence was being insulted.

            G-Reco - (Technically this is supposed to be UC buuuuuuuuut) Incoherent. Tomino doubles down on his worst directorial tendencies, and it's very clear his style of storytelling doesn't jive with modern sensibilities, so this show basically amounts to being a sci-fi mood piece about living in space that's very weird and hard to follow. Apparently the theatrical re-cut is better, but I haven't seen that.

            IBO - Really good, would recommend. A return to form.

            Edit: Huh, I realized my main negative criticism is incoherency, so I better explain that. One of the pitfalls the AU series run into is that they start to riff on the OG UC series, so they start incorporating tropes (cyber-newtypes, Char, etc.) with no regard for how they fit into their respective narratives and the sometimes very different themes or politics those series discuss. To use Seed as an example, the main conflict is framed as one between two near peer super-powers (e.g. US vs China), and not so much a WW2 analogue. So when they inject tropes from the OG series divorced from it's anti-fascist context, the resulting narrative tends to be, well, incoherent.

            • Cromalin [she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              hm. g gundam and wing i plan on checking out, seed i might depending on how good i feel the podcasting is. 00, age, and g-reco i'll probably give an episode or 2 to see how i feel at least

              and i definitely see how your complaint about incoherence could be a problem. i really like prospera as a char (the only non-char char i've seen unless you count jerid, though i know every series has its char) because she feels like a clear riff on the trope while doing something new. she's got plans and revenge and all that, but she's going at it from a completely different angle than char aznable did in 0079, so that's super interesting to me. being a women helps too.

              but i'm imagining some of these have chars that are just like, surface level copies who are blond and have masks and are mysterious enemies without putting in the work because it's a char, you know what a char is