From the Makoto Shinkai film The Place Promised in our Early Days, on the stairs leading to (one of) our protagonists apartment in the later part of the movie. Kind of unclear a screencap, but trust me, that’s totally what those top two boxes say.

I actually spotted this back during a theatrical screening of the movie, shown as part of the Glasgow leg of last years Scotland Loves Anime festival in October, but procrastinated about posting about it because I couldn’t remember where the heck I’d put my DVD copy. It probably shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise, anyway – whilst Garden of Words proved to be more of a Ringo Box movie, and I’ve not been back to check Voices of a Distant Star, both 5cm/s and Children who Chase Long Titles sported orange-transportation devices.

I had been a little terrified about revisiting the movie, though. I’m not a particularly big fan of Shinkai’s work, I’m afraid – I enjoy most of his productions on first viewing, but upon rewatch I tend to be overwhelmed by the extremely tortured writing his work often sports. 5cm/s I found kind of unbearable upon a second viewing. With Place Promised actually being my favourite of Shinkai’s output, or at least the one I enjoyed the most at point of first encounter, I didn’t really want to ruin that – it was nice to be able to say I genuinely enjoyed at least something he’d made.

Saying that, whilst I can’t really remember any of the minutiae as to why given it was the best part of four months ago that I last saw it, I still enjoyed it well enough. All’s well that ends well, I guess!

(PS – Hi there Reddit, I guess? That sure it a lot more traffic than I’m used to… For what it’s worth, when I asked (RoD/Kamichu/Magi) director Koji Masunari about Mikan Boxes at a Welcome to the Space Show Q&A, he said it was mostly due to their commonality in Japan more than any specific memetic thing)

From Precure AllStars New Stage 2, being used as a table by Candy from Smile Precure.

I don’t really have anything left to say about the movie itself – I wrote about it in yesterdays end of year post, having only just gotten around to watching it a couple of days back due to feeling obligated to watch it because mentioning the Precure movies in those posts is pretty much tradition.

I will add that I drew at Peace Janken, though. Darn.
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By which I mean the Index movie – I mean, what better way to display the upgraded theatrical production budget than to throw in such an obvious improvement in Touma’s living space?
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From episode 9 of Watamote, which is short for… the usual reasons that the ever escalating length of Japanese media titles are a pain in the arse to type in full. Seriously, it’s a good thing that the Japanese syllabary is so conducive to contraction. Anyway, it’s in the storage room, so presumably it contains some of Tomoko’s “cherished” childhood possessions.
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Wait, Passionate Idol Activities and Tangerine Boxes in the same cartoon? What kind of crazy paradise have I stumbled into here?!?

I’m not quite sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last couple of months, Aikatsu, a goofy pop idol show produced by Sunrise to promote a goofy pop idol collectors card video arcade game, seems to have firmly embedded itself as the unlikely favourite amongst those on my twitter timeline. It’s maybe hard to discern a particular reason for this in terms of determining a ratio between how much of it is steadily increasing quality, Stockholm syndrome and it continuing through a Spring season which was dominated by a small handful of shows which were mostly more impactful than they necessarily were good.

Well, OK, Stockholm Syndrome is actually grossly unfair a statement – it’s not like the show hasn’t proven itself to be constantly at the very least entertaining, but sometimes it’s more satisfying to watch a show which maintains a certain level of consistency over a long period than it is to watch something that hit’s incredible highs but is incredibly short, if you get what I mean? There’s a lot to be said for something that’s reliable in what it delivers.

That’s assuming you don’t fall into the trap of continuing to watch some kind of boys-comic claptrap what goes on long, long after the material has fallen off a cliff in the futile hope it may regain it’s quality at some point. Not naming any names, of course.

Of course, I absolutely wouldn’t suggest that Aikatsu’s popularity has any relation to how easy it makes it to ship the characters, oh no.

For my part, I’ve been satisfying my appetite for double-artificial idol music by picking up the CDs as they come out – well, aside from Siginalize, which I’ve somehow repeatedly forgotten to buy. I’ve not got the two most recent CDs either, but those are bundled in with next weeks release of the all-important Precure All-Stars New Stage 2 BD. Funny thing is, my favourite song is probably still Idol Katsudou from way back at the start of the series, though as far as the insert songs go, I guess Take Me Higher, Tristars image song, is pretty popular at the moment.

Well, as pretty popular as a song from Aikatsu can get, anyway.