My friend Ginger and I go a long time between in-person visits as it is: she’s in Illinois and I’m in Virginia. So we’re used to not hanging out face-to-face except once a year or so. Our next visit was planned for, well, literally right now. And, unfortunately, we knew months ago that this would probably not happen.
I am not a beauty guru, and regrettably, I do not have all the disposable income on the planet. Together, those pieces make it difficult for me to get every single makeup collection that I want. Sure, I’d love to get PR, but I’m far from being able to do that.
Winter 2020’s stand-out anime is, without a doubt, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! The manga-turned-anime traces a trio of high school girls as they set out to become anime creators. But since one is forbidden from joining the anime club, they form the “Eizouken” (video research club). There, the trio learn about teamwork, visual storytelling, and working to deadlines.
At the tail end of the 2010s, we’ve come into a mindset as a fandom where we analyze everything we watch extremely carefully — sometimes for the better, sometimes to a fault. One thing I’ve seen a lot of hangups on in the last handful of years is what the presence of a character type is assumed to mean about a creator. That is, if a character is present in a series as anything but an outright villain, the writer approves of anything they say or do. I could absolutely speak to some shows where this is the case, but more often than not . . . it just isn’t. And so much is being missed by making this assumption.
At the end of June, Netflix added the Evangelion series into its streaming services. You can watch both the whole series and movies now. I’ll be honest: it’s been years since I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and the proceeding movies that followed. From what I remembered, there were copious amounts of blood, violence and sexually-charged scenes with heavy imagery that lingered in the back of my mind. Of course, I had a feeling I would need to rewatch the series before viewing this movie.
It’s a good thing I did.
Being one of the few Studio Ghibli movies I hadn’t given a chance yet, I had been dying to see Whisper of the Heart. Yet based on the trailer, it’s really difficult to comprehend what the plot was going to be about. I couldn’t tell if it was going to be like Spirited Away, going off into a fantasy land. Or like Grave of the Fireflies, sad and about real life.
To my pleasure, Whisper of the Heart was both!
So, full disclosure. I’m not huge into sports. It’s not a conscious decision — not nowadays, at least. As a teen, back when I still believed you could be Geek and nothing else, it was a choice. But as an adult, I’m largely not into it because my state has no major teams.
I do notice, though, that there is a mentality among some fans that Sports Ain’t Okay. More than that, the fans actually deserve a good mocking whenever possible. There are a few “safe” sports for fans: wrestling and roller derby are okay, and have a lot of visible fan interaction. But if you want to be into one of the Big Four sports, there’s at least a small chance you will be torn down hard.
I was aware of, but not keyed into, this mentality until I heard a major podcaster go there.
A little bit of Kara History: I was a young teen just as Geocities was getting underway. You know, the version with “neighborhoods” and 4-digit addresses? I had three of those. One was dedicated to a fan site for Robin Williams, who was — and remains — my absolute fave. At the time there was no such thing as “official sites” for celebrities, so I did my best to create a repository of knowledge for fans until such time as this happened.
This ended up including whatever news I could find on upcoming film and TV projects, and boy was that rough. There was no such thing as social media, and the concept of an “online marketing campaign” was still to come, so early entertainment news was a lot of dead ends and guessing. The number of “Development Hell” entries there were on my page was staggering, likely because we hadn’t learned yet that “I’d like to do this someday” doesn’t count as a business deal. And on top of that, the concept of an official website for a film was downright novel.
For those of you returning from Part 1, welcome! For people that didn’t read Part 1, fear not! You don’t need to have read that to read this one.
In Part 1, I covered the “Soft Start” to finding anime that has the potential to hold the interest of even the most anime-avoidant viewer, focusing on three spectacular films (Tokyo Godfathers, Spirited Away, and Metropolis) and one spectacular show (Avatar: The Last Airbender).
So in this one, I’ll cover “classic” anime, which for this list I’m defining as having aired in or before 2005. I also stuck with my guidelines from Part 1, only including shows around 60 episodes or less, and avoided the seriously strange ones (even though my heart wanted to include titles like Paranoia Agent).
Don’t hate me: I fully admit the reason I haven’t gotten into these fandoms (yet?) is because I haven’t really given them a chance.