It doesn’t matter what kind of organization you are in, whether is it something as simple as an office setting, where you may have a dozen or so employees, to something more complex like running the First Order, where you have billions of employees, you are going to get gummed up by the bureaucracy. It’s always the same complaints: not enough money, not enough manpower, not enough creative thinking, not enough money, lamebrains messing up your projects, diffident co-workers and not enough money. And if you ARE trying to take over the world, the logistics can get out of control. Such is the world we visit when we come to the enormously-titled “Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department” (“Kaijin Kaihatsubu no Kuroitsu-san”, “Kuroitsu-san in the Superhuman Research & Development Department”).
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So, we have run into another isekai. They are everywhere, like flies and cockroaches. And they seem to be just as difficult to get rid of. I’m not against them per se, but it feels like every other anime series release IS an isekai. Can’t we have something else? No? I have to wait for the craze to die out, like with food shows? OK, I guess. So, the latest offering is the oddly worded “Parallel World Pharmacy” (“Isekai Yakkyoku”, or “Alternate World Pharmacy”). (more…)

Is this another anime trend I see before me? Now, gender change comedies have been with us since the Greeks took ink to paper (or whatever they wrote on). We can discuss “Some Like it Hot”, “Victor/Victoria”, “The Hot Chick” (OK, NOT ‘The Hot Chick”; that one was terrible!) and into the mix we fling another montrapatiously-titled show “She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man (“Kenja no Deshi o Nanoru Kenja”), which also doubles as part of the video game genre for anime. (more…)

It’s hard enough to tell an anime story. You may have a manga to act as a guide, but then comes the hard decisions as to what stays and what goes. I mean, I can take as many pages as I want to tell my story, but 24 minutes is 24 minutes and that CAN’T be argued with. It gets even harder when you try to tell two anime stories at the same time, but that is what you get with “Plunderer” (“Purandara”). (more…)

At least this anime lets you know that it is taking place in another world, although about 20 seconds into the first episode, you would have been made well aware of this. It starts out telling the story, and then jumps into a massive flashback, so you learn how we came to be here in “Isekai Cheat Magician” (“Isekai Chīto Majutsushi”, “Fantasy World Cheat Magician”). (more…)

Why do I keep doing this to myself? I keep going “That’s the last time I will EVER see a ‘Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’ anime!” and the next time it comes around, I’m there. I know that it makes less sense than a presidential executive order, but I can’t help myself, and for this latest turn “Golden Wind” (“JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken Ōgon no Kaze”), it makes even less sense as it goes along. (more…)

We use the term ‘Frankenstein’ to indicate a soulless monster, cobbled together from the parts of other corpses. It’s even used in reality TV, to indicate that things have been cut and pasted together to give a different impression than what happened originally. But for this show, “Frankenstein Family”, (also known as “Creatures Family Days”, “Shiyan Pin Jiating, Jikken-hin Kazoku”), it’s more to indicate they are a caliber of monster or mutant, but I guess “Mutant Family” might have a bigger connotation problem than merely being called ‘Frankenstein’. (more…)

OK, so we are genuinely building to a series of climaxes, as each season is upping the stakes in “My Hero Academia”, to the point that it is a genuine wonder that none of them have dropped out. I mean, I suppose it’s nice to have a quirk, but some people have a quirk that’s not much better than being able to raise or lower the temperature of a room by 17 degrees. Still, it appears the villains are ‘shoving all the chips in’ to see what goes down. (more…)

Part of the problem with the spy genre is that everything gets tethered to James Bond, so you end up missing some really good spy work (think more of George Smiley). So we have a spy drama before us that not only plays the cat-and-mouse game, but does it with more going on at the same time and with this many chainsaws being juggled, catastrophe is a mere distracted moment away. Welcome to “Spy X Family.” (more…)

I have remarked that when you see an uptick in OVAs or short runs of a series that completed its first season, it is a prelude to the release of the next season, but they want to let you know it’s coming with more than a notice on the internet going “The second season is coming!” It’s just there was a two-run OVA about a year or so ago and now “Nanatsu no Taizai: Seisen no Shirushi” (“The Seven Deadly Sins: Signs of the Holy War”) came out with what they refer to as a TV Special that acts as a prelude to the new season. (more…)