2026: My First Quarter in Anime
Apr. 1st, 2026 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith a new year beginning my personal schedule of anime to be watched wasn’t that different from the broad strokes of last year’s concluding months. Working to finish some long series, I’d filled the spaces between them with shows of somewhat varying vintage. As ever, shifting between new or nearly-new and older works is a small distinguishing factor.
In these recent months I have been conscious of the complaints of others about disc releases drying up, the blame loaded on that familiar target of a large impersonal corporation. Having made it through a different sort of collapse involving “more discs being made than were being sold” might amount to a different perspective, or maybe just an excuse to shrug. I am conscious of the temptation to twist “well, when you can’t buy domestic releases...” into something self-serving (rather than making a big deal of importing untranslated Japanese releases, of course). Having bought anime on discs faster than I’ve been able to watch those discs for years is something else, anyway.
It took just a little thinking about all of the series Aniplex of America has laid claims to before I could push back a threatening thought that I’d rather have had the chance to buy “anything else” than Demon Slayer as a Blu-Ray priced about the same as releases from less Japanese-aligned companies. Even before I’d altogether dealt with that thought, though, I hadn’t lingered that long before opening the latest plot arc’s worth of episodes sold in an affordable release. It was just a matter of being aware the series had kept wearing out its welcome among other fans with the “Hashira Training Arc.” Following the unexpected conclusion of the previous arc, the demons had drawn back as if to plot something especially terrible and final. In that space the ailing leader of the Demon Slayer Corps had requested his most skilled sword-wielders, the “Hashira,” improve the skills of the rank-and-file. As soon as he’d emerged from his latest stay in the Demon Slayer hospital, the protagonist Tanjiro had joined the training with his usual pluck, learning a bit more about the Hashira he hadn’t already fought alongside. All of this filled episodes (but not quite as many episodes as had made up the previous plot arcs, even with the first and last extended-length productions again) to push off the next major bit of plot into movie-sized blocks of animation, the first of which had already screened (and even over here in a special limited engagement) when I watched the episodes. In the end, however, I do have to admit the training hadn’t been quite as tedious for me to get through as some of the complaints might have implied.
Knowing I’d finish Demon Slayer before three months had passed, I did some counting of the episodes I still had to watch from the original Urusei Yatsura TV series, and realised that if I “doubled up” on them with the newer show finished I’d reach the genuine end of that long-running series. As I headed there, even if things were still a little slow-paced at times I didn’t feel as if the show was “drifting to a halt.” A new trick where someone’s head would enlarge as they yelled at someone else did get my attention, but so did some episodes where things were different enough on either side of the “eyecatch” to give a sense of variety in a single story. After certain episodes focusing on an irascable yet long-suffering teacher I did think, where I might not have before, about how much of the series bumped against how some people over here had spent the 1980s proclaiming that “Japan took education seriously.”
Along the way I did manage to block out the time to watch the fourth Urusei Yatsura movie, Lum the Forever, which I understood had opened just weeks before the series finished. It just so happened, though, that in retrieving one of my university anime club’s once-a-term “zines” to look up its antique article on Evangelion, I ran into an overview of the works Rumiko Takahashi had created by that point. That summary included the conventional wisdom I’d picked up in subsequent years about the movies becoming less impressive with time. I at least wanted to note how this movie made a big point of “What if Lum herself was to disappear?”, but that’s not all that different from the movie preceding it. As for the series, with an advance impression the penultimate episode would be as distinctive as the final one (and that second-to-last episode was in fact a brief opening counting down a top ten as voted on by fans before rebroadcasting the visibly older number one choice) I did ponder the third-to-last episode involving Ran, who often wears frilly dresses outside of high school (which, I have to admit, do something more for me than her own “sexy space girl” garb) and has a high-pitched cutie-pie voice, except when she gets angry at Lum and her voice deepens. I suppose I can wonder now about Ran being one of the more appealing secondary characters to me.
The last episode made an effort to squeeze in glimpses at least of a good number of the show’s vast cast, but as I’d expected it wasn’t to any great extent “final.” I kept reflecting on how Urusei Yatsura might have impressed me from the beginning for managing to escape “you desperately want these characters to just fix their problems” or even “a bunch of smokin’-hot girls lust after one utterly unimpressive guy, and it’s all just unsatisfying tease,” but maybe I was thinking a bit of how I still have eleven OVAs (my last chance to happen on the events I still believe I once saw in university, if in a showing organized outside the anime club) and two movies left to watch, and whether I’ll finish them (even if I don’t intend to move straight on to them) thinking most of all of the second half of the remake, and whether I’ll finish that with the volumes of the original manga I haven’t read yet still in mind...
When some end-of-season wrapups appeared to look back on a recent series with positivity surviving, I decided to watch Sanda myself, and that despite “heading away from Christmas” rather than approaching the holiday. The titular character of the series is a teenaged boy who, as things get started, is put in a situation where if he wears something red (and blood getting on his white school uniform shirt just happens to work) he bursts out of his clothing transforming into a robust, well-muscled Santa Claus to whom the phrase “bowl full of jelly” does not apply. Sanda happens to live in an ominous near-future where the population of Japan has continued to decline and the remaining teenagers his age are coddled and controlled, idealized and infantilized. (To be honest, I thought “it’s kind of refreshing to be confronting someone else’s worry” for all that there was recent news of my own country’s population shrinking.) What resulted from that all seemed to approach those anime series that appeal to me for presenting absurdity with a straight face. I had wondered about certain comments that “the transformation is a puberty metaphor!” and whether this would make the series one of those titles where it’s just a little trickier to push back the awareness I’m not in the target demographic (even if I’m forever telling myself having missed the chance to start watching anime in my own high school years just might have contributed to my interest in it not burning out the way it did for many others about my age). There was just enough “better and worse ways to deal with old age” and “having to become an actual adult” to the show, though, that I supposed I could also accept it quite well. I did wonder about it amounting to “a mere curtain-raiser for the manga it was adapted from,” but it did in fact address the initial crisis that led to the first transformation rather than leaving it some distant promise. In the end, too, I was less left on a cliffhanger than wondering just how things would begin to move again at all.
Perhaps more than a little while ago now I took some note of advance announcements of a series with the distinctive title Turkey!, which looked to involve “cute girls bowling.” I took a look at some first-episode reactions, but saw them making a certain wry deal of a big surprise there. The five girls had started off with their high school team close to splitting up. This involved but wasn’t summed up in how their pink-haired leader could bowl three strikes in a row (which is a “turkey”) but always blows the next frame. While trying to surpass this while a thunderstorm rages outside the bowling alley, all of a sudden mysterious events occur and everyone is transported, with their bowling balls and several changes of clothing, back to “the Sengoku period,” years of medieval civil war in Japan...
I still kept a cautious ear open, and in the end there did seem some positive reactions to the reconfigured series even if it took me a little while longer to start watching it myself. As it turned out, “bowling” continued to be of utmost importance even in the past, and in just such a way as to stay amusing to me. “Getting back to the present” wasn’t the only question at hand, and the first-episode surprise wasn’t the only one in store, as the girls helped the members of a well-off family as colour-coded as they were and worked through their own issues. On a more superficial level, the series did show what I thought to be a reasonable amount of cute-girl appeal and polish too.
A double dose of Wonderful Precure! every weekend stayed appealing. Remembering how the preceding Pretty Cure series I’ve seen made big introductions around their halfway marks, I was still a bit surprised when this show went from the monsters-of-the-episode just hatching out of ominous eggs with scattered glimpses of an ominous motivator to bringing in the more familiar minions unleashing those monsters. It did work, though. Shuffling all the transformation sequences into the space of a single musical cue as if to make room for an elaborate power-up sequence might not have benefited them, but all in all the interest and development packed in kept working. I did notice the show making its own effort to develop a boy doing his best to assist the girls (whose own pet is a perpetually dour-looking rabbit), conscious of the temptation to start theorizing about just what the home country audience might be like and whether there’s some recent element of “trying to expand it” or just “supposing this might ease the general experience for some.” By the last episodes, though, I was conscious that the Pretty Cure series that had followed this one (and had its main character introduced at the very end of this show) had never quite managed to engage with (older, English-speaking) fans. Right now, I’m stuck waiting in a “hope springs eternal” way to see if the very latest series in the franchise can manage to maintain more positive reactions.
After going back to several titles in the concluding months of last year with the feeling I was managing this at last, I kept that up with the giant robot series Gurren Lagann. I tried to set my thoughts about that down in a separate post. What more I’ve thought of saying here is that I did ponder, on looking back at what I recorded the first time I watched the series, about an impression its bombastic escalations had overwhelmed some, if not all, of the other titles I’d been watching then. If Gurren Lagann can’t be proclaimed “the last uncondemned mecha anime” in the face of online dismissals, then the series in that ambiguous position would seem to be the original Eureka Seven. I’ve been stuck with the thought the earlier series didn’t resonate with me in quite the same way it did for so many others, but now I see I’d been trying to conclude it at the same time I’d been watching Gurren Lagann. (Of course, Eureka Seven could also have been that much more a “post-Evangelion” series in that its story world seemed more of an enigma to be pieced together from scattered hints.) I suppose I did think about how I’d always been interested in coming back to more episodes of Gurren Lagann each week this time, but now it might not have “overwhelmed” the varied titles I was also watching.
I’d been conscious that Shinkalion: Change the World hadn’t been quite as long (by about three months’ worth of episodes) as the Shinkalion sequel, and that hadn’t been quite as long (again by about three months’ worth of episodes) as the original transforming-bullet-train anime. (I did skip several clip shows in any case, and at least one of them might have had a bit of original connective tissue, to say nothing of a “making of” show.) The conclusion of the latest series didn’t quite feel “abrupt,” though, and did link “giant robots battle monster-machines of the week in a generic battlespace” together with “virtual reality is the in thing now, right?” while filling in backstory even if the very last episodes could have been taken as something of an epilogue. The main characters being a bit older and their built-in conflicts biting a bit deeper, but not overwhelming them, continued to work. I suppose I could think it was nice to be able to watch a series only available via fansubs and not have to deal with a great number of reactions, of whatever sort, from others.
When Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End returned (just a little later than other shows) I unbent on “let other people take the chance on new series,” even if several horror stories of notable titles the follow-ups for which were found lacking in appropriate dedication came back to mind not that long afterwards. Aware of how the series had shifted its focus before and how others had disdained that then, I was interested in promises of the main trio of characters getting back on the road. I was also pleased as these new episodes continued when some of the expanded cast showed up again. At the same time, I was conscious of people who seemed to ready to insist the show still wasn’t as profound as it had appeared in its first episodes; supposing “some just aren’t happy with anything” can only go so far. I might have wound up telling myself things being “pleasant,” with two small adventures in many episodes (and a somewhat larger confrontation partway through), ought to be sufficient in itself.
In these recent months I have been conscious of the complaints of others about disc releases drying up, the blame loaded on that familiar target of a large impersonal corporation. Having made it through a different sort of collapse involving “more discs being made than were being sold” might amount to a different perspective, or maybe just an excuse to shrug. I am conscious of the temptation to twist “well, when you can’t buy domestic releases...” into something self-serving (rather than making a big deal of importing untranslated Japanese releases, of course). Having bought anime on discs faster than I’ve been able to watch those discs for years is something else, anyway.
It took just a little thinking about all of the series Aniplex of America has laid claims to before I could push back a threatening thought that I’d rather have had the chance to buy “anything else” than Demon Slayer as a Blu-Ray priced about the same as releases from less Japanese-aligned companies. Even before I’d altogether dealt with that thought, though, I hadn’t lingered that long before opening the latest plot arc’s worth of episodes sold in an affordable release. It was just a matter of being aware the series had kept wearing out its welcome among other fans with the “Hashira Training Arc.” Following the unexpected conclusion of the previous arc, the demons had drawn back as if to plot something especially terrible and final. In that space the ailing leader of the Demon Slayer Corps had requested his most skilled sword-wielders, the “Hashira,” improve the skills of the rank-and-file. As soon as he’d emerged from his latest stay in the Demon Slayer hospital, the protagonist Tanjiro had joined the training with his usual pluck, learning a bit more about the Hashira he hadn’t already fought alongside. All of this filled episodes (but not quite as many episodes as had made up the previous plot arcs, even with the first and last extended-length productions again) to push off the next major bit of plot into movie-sized blocks of animation, the first of which had already screened (and even over here in a special limited engagement) when I watched the episodes. In the end, however, I do have to admit the training hadn’t been quite as tedious for me to get through as some of the complaints might have implied.
Knowing I’d finish Demon Slayer before three months had passed, I did some counting of the episodes I still had to watch from the original Urusei Yatsura TV series, and realised that if I “doubled up” on them with the newer show finished I’d reach the genuine end of that long-running series. As I headed there, even if things were still a little slow-paced at times I didn’t feel as if the show was “drifting to a halt.” A new trick where someone’s head would enlarge as they yelled at someone else did get my attention, but so did some episodes where things were different enough on either side of the “eyecatch” to give a sense of variety in a single story. After certain episodes focusing on an irascable yet long-suffering teacher I did think, where I might not have before, about how much of the series bumped against how some people over here had spent the 1980s proclaiming that “Japan took education seriously.”
Along the way I did manage to block out the time to watch the fourth Urusei Yatsura movie, Lum the Forever, which I understood had opened just weeks before the series finished. It just so happened, though, that in retrieving one of my university anime club’s once-a-term “zines” to look up its antique article on Evangelion, I ran into an overview of the works Rumiko Takahashi had created by that point. That summary included the conventional wisdom I’d picked up in subsequent years about the movies becoming less impressive with time. I at least wanted to note how this movie made a big point of “What if Lum herself was to disappear?”, but that’s not all that different from the movie preceding it. As for the series, with an advance impression the penultimate episode would be as distinctive as the final one (and that second-to-last episode was in fact a brief opening counting down a top ten as voted on by fans before rebroadcasting the visibly older number one choice) I did ponder the third-to-last episode involving Ran, who often wears frilly dresses outside of high school (which, I have to admit, do something more for me than her own “sexy space girl” garb) and has a high-pitched cutie-pie voice, except when she gets angry at Lum and her voice deepens. I suppose I can wonder now about Ran being one of the more appealing secondary characters to me.
The last episode made an effort to squeeze in glimpses at least of a good number of the show’s vast cast, but as I’d expected it wasn’t to any great extent “final.” I kept reflecting on how Urusei Yatsura might have impressed me from the beginning for managing to escape “you desperately want these characters to just fix their problems” or even “a bunch of smokin’-hot girls lust after one utterly unimpressive guy, and it’s all just unsatisfying tease,” but maybe I was thinking a bit of how I still have eleven OVAs (my last chance to happen on the events I still believe I once saw in university, if in a showing organized outside the anime club) and two movies left to watch, and whether I’ll finish them (even if I don’t intend to move straight on to them) thinking most of all of the second half of the remake, and whether I’ll finish that with the volumes of the original manga I haven’t read yet still in mind...
When some end-of-season wrapups appeared to look back on a recent series with positivity surviving, I decided to watch Sanda myself, and that despite “heading away from Christmas” rather than approaching the holiday. The titular character of the series is a teenaged boy who, as things get started, is put in a situation where if he wears something red (and blood getting on his white school uniform shirt just happens to work) he bursts out of his clothing transforming into a robust, well-muscled Santa Claus to whom the phrase “bowl full of jelly” does not apply. Sanda happens to live in an ominous near-future where the population of Japan has continued to decline and the remaining teenagers his age are coddled and controlled, idealized and infantilized. (To be honest, I thought “it’s kind of refreshing to be confronting someone else’s worry” for all that there was recent news of my own country’s population shrinking.) What resulted from that all seemed to approach those anime series that appeal to me for presenting absurdity with a straight face. I had wondered about certain comments that “the transformation is a puberty metaphor!” and whether this would make the series one of those titles where it’s just a little trickier to push back the awareness I’m not in the target demographic (even if I’m forever telling myself having missed the chance to start watching anime in my own high school years just might have contributed to my interest in it not burning out the way it did for many others about my age). There was just enough “better and worse ways to deal with old age” and “having to become an actual adult” to the show, though, that I supposed I could also accept it quite well. I did wonder about it amounting to “a mere curtain-raiser for the manga it was adapted from,” but it did in fact address the initial crisis that led to the first transformation rather than leaving it some distant promise. In the end, too, I was less left on a cliffhanger than wondering just how things would begin to move again at all.
Perhaps more than a little while ago now I took some note of advance announcements of a series with the distinctive title Turkey!, which looked to involve “cute girls bowling.” I took a look at some first-episode reactions, but saw them making a certain wry deal of a big surprise there. The five girls had started off with their high school team close to splitting up. This involved but wasn’t summed up in how their pink-haired leader could bowl three strikes in a row (which is a “turkey”) but always blows the next frame. While trying to surpass this while a thunderstorm rages outside the bowling alley, all of a sudden mysterious events occur and everyone is transported, with their bowling balls and several changes of clothing, back to “the Sengoku period,” years of medieval civil war in Japan...
I still kept a cautious ear open, and in the end there did seem some positive reactions to the reconfigured series even if it took me a little while longer to start watching it myself. As it turned out, “bowling” continued to be of utmost importance even in the past, and in just such a way as to stay amusing to me. “Getting back to the present” wasn’t the only question at hand, and the first-episode surprise wasn’t the only one in store, as the girls helped the members of a well-off family as colour-coded as they were and worked through their own issues. On a more superficial level, the series did show what I thought to be a reasonable amount of cute-girl appeal and polish too.
A double dose of Wonderful Precure! every weekend stayed appealing. Remembering how the preceding Pretty Cure series I’ve seen made big introductions around their halfway marks, I was still a bit surprised when this show went from the monsters-of-the-episode just hatching out of ominous eggs with scattered glimpses of an ominous motivator to bringing in the more familiar minions unleashing those monsters. It did work, though. Shuffling all the transformation sequences into the space of a single musical cue as if to make room for an elaborate power-up sequence might not have benefited them, but all in all the interest and development packed in kept working. I did notice the show making its own effort to develop a boy doing his best to assist the girls (whose own pet is a perpetually dour-looking rabbit), conscious of the temptation to start theorizing about just what the home country audience might be like and whether there’s some recent element of “trying to expand it” or just “supposing this might ease the general experience for some.” By the last episodes, though, I was conscious that the Pretty Cure series that had followed this one (and had its main character introduced at the very end of this show) had never quite managed to engage with (older, English-speaking) fans. Right now, I’m stuck waiting in a “hope springs eternal” way to see if the very latest series in the franchise can manage to maintain more positive reactions.
After going back to several titles in the concluding months of last year with the feeling I was managing this at last, I kept that up with the giant robot series Gurren Lagann. I tried to set my thoughts about that down in a separate post. What more I’ve thought of saying here is that I did ponder, on looking back at what I recorded the first time I watched the series, about an impression its bombastic escalations had overwhelmed some, if not all, of the other titles I’d been watching then. If Gurren Lagann can’t be proclaimed “the last uncondemned mecha anime” in the face of online dismissals, then the series in that ambiguous position would seem to be the original Eureka Seven. I’ve been stuck with the thought the earlier series didn’t resonate with me in quite the same way it did for so many others, but now I see I’d been trying to conclude it at the same time I’d been watching Gurren Lagann. (Of course, Eureka Seven could also have been that much more a “post-Evangelion” series in that its story world seemed more of an enigma to be pieced together from scattered hints.) I suppose I did think about how I’d always been interested in coming back to more episodes of Gurren Lagann each week this time, but now it might not have “overwhelmed” the varied titles I was also watching.
I’d been conscious that Shinkalion: Change the World hadn’t been quite as long (by about three months’ worth of episodes) as the Shinkalion sequel, and that hadn’t been quite as long (again by about three months’ worth of episodes) as the original transforming-bullet-train anime. (I did skip several clip shows in any case, and at least one of them might have had a bit of original connective tissue, to say nothing of a “making of” show.) The conclusion of the latest series didn’t quite feel “abrupt,” though, and did link “giant robots battle monster-machines of the week in a generic battlespace” together with “virtual reality is the in thing now, right?” while filling in backstory even if the very last episodes could have been taken as something of an epilogue. The main characters being a bit older and their built-in conflicts biting a bit deeper, but not overwhelming them, continued to work. I suppose I could think it was nice to be able to watch a series only available via fansubs and not have to deal with a great number of reactions, of whatever sort, from others.
When Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End returned (just a little later than other shows) I unbent on “let other people take the chance on new series,” even if several horror stories of notable titles the follow-ups for which were found lacking in appropriate dedication came back to mind not that long afterwards. Aware of how the series had shifted its focus before and how others had disdained that then, I was interested in promises of the main trio of characters getting back on the road. I was also pleased as these new episodes continued when some of the expanded cast showed up again. At the same time, I was conscious of people who seemed to ready to insist the show still wasn’t as profound as it had appeared in its first episodes; supposing “some just aren’t happy with anything” can only go so far. I might have wound up telling myself things being “pleasant,” with two small adventures in many episodes (and a somewhat larger confrontation partway through), ought to be sufficient in itself.