Once again it's time (and pasttime) for my usual retrospective look back at the season tosee how shows wound up, following on my early impressions and my more solid midway views .The short summary is that fall was a good season ( at least for me ). AsI sometimes do, I'm ranking shows a bit more by how much I enjoyed themthan by how good I think they are.

Excellent:

• Shirobako : This has become the surprise hit of the season and insome

The most recent Log Horizon 2 episode has made me fully realize thatthe show's largest single flaw is how it's addressing Minori's romanticfeelings for Shiroe, and unfortunately this is a serious flaw thatsignificantly lessens the show for me; it actively makes things painfulany time the storyline comes up. That the show focused almost all ofepisode 13 on the whole mess made the episode kind of unpleasant towatch.

The problem is not Minori's feelings as such; they're sort of

It's not often that you get a master class in theimportance of directing, and in about three minutesflat. But now we have one, courtesy of a competition betweenStudio Khara and game developer CyberConnect2. As ANN explains ( via ), bothstudios made shorts based on the same character designs (and maybe 3Dmodels, it's not clear), basic situation, and maybe even scenario outline,and the contrast between them is really illuminating.

Let's start with CyberConnect2'

Back in The perspectives of the anicamera Isaid that I didn't think I'd ever seen telephoto perspective used inanime. It turns out that I'm wrong about that, as a recent shot in Shirobako showed me. Let's start with the actual shot itself:

( full-sized )

What we're seeing here is a classic telephoto perspective, whereeverything is stacked up on top of each other and there's very littledistinction between close objects and further away ones. Notice,

This is not exactly 'midway', but let's let that go; it's more than timefor the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season . I'm actually glad I waited this much because the latestepisode of one particular show has caused a drastic change in my attitudesto it.

Excellent:

• Mushishi second season: In contrast to the first half of this back in the spring , we're back topowerful stories that fully engage me. Since Ginko has stillbeen

It's time for another early impressions post, as before . I have to admit that these early impressions areactually rather late in the 'early' stage of things, for no particularlygood reason (although Mushishi did only start airing last week). Myoverall view is that this is a really strong season with a major goodsurprise and I'm very happy with how things have come out. Any seasonwhere I worry that I'm watching too many shows to be sustainable is agood season.

I am generally not a mecha fan, Gundam included, but I've wound up seeingsome Gundam works that have genuinely impressed me and stuck with me;right now I'd say that my two top works are The 08th MS Team and Warin the Pocket . For reasons that don't fit in the margins of this entryI recently wound up thinking about how important the presence of Gundamsis in those two shows. Could you take the mobile suits out and replacethem with something else without

As before , it's time (and long past time)for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well thefinal result matched up with my early impressions and my midway views . This has been delayed partlybecause the summer season turned out to be an almost total bust forme; I only managed to watch one show all the way through as it aired.

Watched and finished:

• Aldnoah.Zero : This was a reasonably entertaining show but I wouldn'tcall it particularly great; however

I watch anime in translation (via subtitles), and almost all of the timeI passively assume that the translation is essentially seamless and moreor less transparent; what I'm reading on the screen is close enough tothe original Japanese dialog that I'm missing at most minor nuances.Every so often there are stumbling blocks and near non-sequiturs andthe rare moment where I can make out a Japanese word that I recognizeand tell that the translated dialog is not quite what the charactersactually said, but