Call of the Night, like most anime, explores the emotional tangle of growing up, only with vampires. Ko is a high school drop out who struggles with school and fitting into society. He drops out of both, even to the point of avoiding the daylight hours. During his nocturnal roaming, he stumbles across the vampire…
Category: Anime
The Kyoto Animation Fire and Mental Health Pleas
In 2019, Shinji Aoba broke into Kyoto Animation studio (also known as KyoAni), sprayed gasoline, and ignited it. He escaped to the nearby train station before collapsing from the burns he also sustained. Witnesses reported (BBC, 2019): “A person with singed hair was lying down and there were bloody footprints,” a 59-year-old woman living nearby…
Why are Anime Obsessed with Big Boobs?
Anime is obsessed with breasts. Top-heavy female characters appear across anime stories, including stories aimed at girls. Female characters obsess over their bust size, fondling larger friends or feeling self-conscious about their own small bust. It’s easy to dismiss this as simply “boobs sell” and anime is made for horny teen guys. These are partial…
Crunchyroll’s Western Anime Monopoly
Sony Pictures Entertainment, the owner of Funimation, bought Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion in 2021 (Simons, 2021). In the past, Funimation and Crunchyroll worked together, distributing pieces of each other’s anime catalogs. Now, we have a vast, unified catalog, but we also don’t have real alternatives for anime consumption in the West. Okay, smaller,…
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Facing Death and Memory
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End goes deep. You won’t find philosophical musings like in Ghost in the Shell, nor does Frieren goes into the darkness that some stories dive deep into. No, the story retains hope and humor, while allowing death to permeate the story. Frieren, after the deaths of the human heroes who she had…
Anime I Keep Revisiting
Some stories continue to resonate years after you first watch them. I revisit few anime. Fewer still do I watch again and again. Every so many years, I feel an urge to revisit certain video games: Final Fantasy VI, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, and various classic Mario games. The…