Anime Review Roundup

The review for Bungo Stray Dogs Season 3 had been on my hard drive for several months before I got around to posting it, given how I’ve been rationing out the anime reviews to have at least one a week. Naturally I’ve forgotten what Bungo Stray Dogs is all about by this point, although I’m pretty sure that it has nothing to do with wombles. It is one of those shows that cloak a rather mundane anime genre with powerful production values, without transcending that genre. It’s like most big budget Hollywood productions then. Given that it’s a show about people with special powers getting into all manner of conflicts, it’s more Hollywood even than that. Click on the review to read more.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Part 1 – Beginnings. There’s a tradition of taking popular anime TV series and simply re-editing them to a theatrical release format, which can be a bit hit and miss. It’s all about making the best use of the time available, and sometimes, squeezing a 2-cour, 26 episode series into 90 minutes results in a messy and unedifying highlights package. But Puella Magi Madoka Magica is one of the signature TV events of the 21st Century thus far, and for its single cour, 5 hour runtime, they made two feature films running to over 4 hours. Cutting out credit sequences, recaps and previews, that’s almost one to one. There is still a bit of editorial finessing to make the episodes work as a movie, but this Evangelion type deconstruction of the magical girl genre works stupendously well as feature films. The first film is all set-up, taking the story to a natural, cliff-hanger stopping point. And all the effort saved in editing gets put into enhancing the animation, and levelling up the backgrounds, giving the story a properly theatrical feel.