Author: bateszi
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Time to champion Ookiku Furikabutte
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/ ReviewsRead More →: Time to champion Ookiku FurikabutteLiving in ol’ Blightly, we aren’t taught the delights of baseball. For us, it’s either cricket or rounders, and the latter’s enjoyed mostly by girls anyway. So I sat down to watch Ookiku Furikabutte knowing basically zip all about the game, except that the Americans (especially Bobby De Niro) are mad about it. Why bother…
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Blame! Adventure-seeker Killy's Cyber Dungeon animated
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Read More →: Blame! Adventure-seeker Killy's Cyber Dungeon animatedIf there’s one genre I’m always likely to love, it’s dark, heavy science fiction. As attested by the bitterly disappointing Ergo Proxy and Oshii’s philosophically-loaded Innocence, it’s a subset of anime that’s prone to artistic pretension of the highest order, but even still, when it works, as in the case of the viscerally despondent Texhnolyze,…
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8-bit impressions
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Read More →: 8-bit impressionsInstead of spending hours writing about just one series, this week I’ve dragged myself in the opposite direction and reflected on four of my current favourites. There’s no real reason for the Tekkon Kinkreet image above, except to say that it’s one of the finest examples of fan-art I’ve clapped eyes on; tobiee is an…
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Musical memories of Gurren Lagann, recalling a whimsical dystopia
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Read More →: Musical memories of Gurren Lagann, recalling a whimsical dystopiaNot sure how I missed this, but the full soundtrack for Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was released recently; that’s 51 tracks of epic, exciting, heavenly music, and even better, it contains the one song I’ve be longing to hear since late-July. I’m talking about track 13 on Disc no.2; the translated title is “The Days…
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Basking in the inferno of Cloverfield, remembering Blue Gender
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/ ReviewsRead More →: Basking in the inferno of Cloverfield, remembering Blue GenderHead-spinning, stomach-turning and mind-racing are a few of the adjectives I’d choose to describe how I felt when I stumbled out of the cinema last night, having just suffered through Cloverfield. To say I’d been looking forward to this film would be an understatement, and even though I’d only discovered its baffling trailer in early…
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Digging up backlogged gems, like Great Teacher Onizuka
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/ ReviewsRead More →: Digging up backlogged gems, like Great Teacher OnizukaIf MyAnimeList has taught me anything, it’s that for every merely-good new anime series airing right now, there are many more excellent but old (and therefore, forgotten) gems just waiting to be found. Since I joined that site, I’ve spent countless hours trawling through their hefty archives of anime, trying to build up a well-structured…
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Spiralling into insanity, looking at Junji Ito’s horror manga Uzumaki
Read More →: Spiralling into insanity, looking at Junji Ito’s horror manga UzumakiI’ve been reading a lot of manga lately. In the past, I’d go through brief fits of reading the stuff, but it always felt temporary, like a fling while my romance with anime hit the buffers. This time, it’s totally different; I’m ready to devour as much as I can find. By and large, anime…
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Another step Toward the Terra, circa 1980; old or not, it's still great
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/ ReviewsRead More →: Another step Toward the Terra, circa 1980; old or not, it's still greatBe it 1980 or 2008, To Terra…. is just a wonderful story, a timeless one, even, that I can always watch or read and be completely lost in imagination.
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The world is not beautiful, therefore it is; introducing Kino’s Journey
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/ ReviewsRead More →: The world is not beautiful, therefore it is; introducing Kino’s JourneyI quite like subversive fairy-tales; the suggestion that there is something ugly and unknown shifting beneath a veneer of superficial beauty. This is precisely why I so admired Princess Tutu, because lurking behind that familiar style of magical girl characterization was insecurity and doubt; supposed heroes and villains stalked by emotions betraying their cliche destinies.…