From episode 12 of Nichijou. Technically it’s on a poster for the Go-Soccer Club, but it counts regardless, OK?
(more…)

From She and her Cat ~Everything Flows~(*), the short series based on the even shorter Makoto Shinkai short. I’m not actually sure why I’m even aware of this one, given I didn’t even watch the show (I hear it’s pretty good), but here we are. I gather it contains the titular cat. I presume it isn’t getting thrown into a river – this isn’t exactly Utena, or at least I don’t imagine it is. As I say, I’ve not actually seen it.
(more…)

From episode 5 of Tesagure! Bakatsumono, which I somehow missed when I originally watched it despite it being in plain sight, so thanks Elliot of, err, three years ago?

Anyway, Tesagure (which is probably best known for it’s OP that has lyrics that describe the stereotypical OP cuts it uses as they appear on screen) is one of those semi-improv shows that were all the rage (well, slightly the rage) a few years back, no doubt thanks to the emergence of cheap animation tools like MikuMikuDance, where the characters just end chatting nonsense about a bunch of random topics. In this particular episode, they discuss uniforms that somehow cup huge boobs, and cycling comics. I kind of feel that the demand for this kind of thing has probably been somewhat subsumed into the whole vtuber thing, though to be fair, it’s not like the entire medium of anime hadn’t peaked with gdgdFairies already anyway.

(Though Tesagure is one of the better examples of such a thing if you are in the mood for it, weird third series possibly aside)

At this point in the backlog, I’m running into the ones I don’t readily have screenshots or easy access to videos of, so in the the spirit of being lazy, here’s a photograph I took some six years ago in a branch of HMV that no longer exists of the Mikan Box in the Spanish Quarter in the Ghibli movie From Up On Poppy Hill. Plus it’s probably funnier for me just to half-arse it like this anyway.

For what it’s worth, I have actually seen the movie – I caught a festival screening pretty early on – and I like it well enough and all, but it’s not something I have ever particularly felt the need to watch again, so it’s sure not something I have a disk copy of lying around or anything.

I’m generally a lot cooler on Ghibli’s output than I used to be anyway. I mean, Porco Rosso and Whisper of the Heart being functionally perfect movies aside, I suppose as one grows older, one comes to appreciate Takahata’s eccentricities over the Miyazaki that tends to come more quickly to mind.

Although I say this, I’d probably enjoy the heck out of, I dunno, Laputa if actually sat down at watched it again, but I can’t particularly say I have much compelling me to do so these days.

(Also the vacuum left by Miyazaki’s latest attempt to retire just ends up leading to usually interesting directors like Keiichi Hara making uncharacteristically bland movies like Birthday Wonderland in an attempt to plug some kind of perceived void, but ho-hum)

From episode 9 of Ninja Hattori. If you are wondering how I even spotted that there’s a Mikan Box in this one, well…

(more…)