Author on Ano Natsu :

Overall, I think the anime was expertly executed. I am struggling toidentify a romantic comedy equally good. [...]

(He then identifies Nodame Cantabile as a strong contender but feels itsfocus was more or less elsewhere.)

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure that Ano Natsu isreally a romantic comedy; it's a romance, but not so much a comedy inthe way that, say, Nodame Cantabile is.

Ano Natsu

Author :

Upotte was supposed to be this filthy innuendo vehicle for dirtyperverts… but it really is not. It turned out to be a comedy, andhonestly I liked its comedic payload more than that of Naruto SD.Funco dealing with puberty gave the haters the excuse to lash out, butit’s entirely up to the viewer where to focus.

I had a strongly negative reaction to the firstepisode of Upotte! when I tried to watch it, but that's far fromuniversal and a number of

Back when I wrote about reducing what I was watching inthe winter , I was somewhat negativeabout Aquarion EVOL . However I'm still watching it,somewhat to my surprise. It's not because of EVOL's plot , characters,or story; I don't like any of them half as much as I do in the original Aquarion . But what EVOL has going for it over the original is thatEVOL has completely embraced the crazy, and doing this makes it easilywatchable just in order to

As before , here are my sort of early impressions ofanother season's worth of shows. These are more or less in the order Iwatched the shows (which is not necessarily the order they aired in),although I'm not sure this order is useful for anyone but me. As usualfor seasons (but unlike last season), the start of the season has beenfairly strung out and so have these early impressions; in fact, notpublishing this entry is getting embarrassing.

• Ozma (or

I was completely oblivious to Sai Mecha last year, butthis year I'm on Twitter and so I'm getting a lot more exposure to the whole animeblogosphere thing. So here are my nominations for Sai Mecha 2012 ,made partly so I can be amused by ghostlightning's scorn and be burned at the stake as a heretic.

My big heresy is that I'm not particularly a mecha fan. Very few mechapersuade me to actually believe in them; usually I am somewhere between

When I started hearing about it and during the early episodes, Iexpected Moretsu Pirates to be an action show. You know, with pirating(or at least privateering), space battles, and so on. Since then I'vecome around to the feeling that Pirates is actually a character study,primarily of Marika.

As an action show, Pirates is kind of disappointing because therehasn't been much action; the show's been 'slow-moving' (from an actionpoint of view)

I've been thinking over my view of AnoNatsu ever since it endedrecently. In the end I can summarize my tangled thoughts this way: Ienjoyed the show quite a bit but I don't know if you will, because Idon't know how much sense parts of it will make if you haven't alsoseen Onegai Teacher (which I have).

To start with let's talk about the things that AnoNatsu did well andin particular, I want to talk about how it wasted

Back in 2008 when I set up my D90 and wrote down my settings , I said this about the AE-L button:

I don't know enough to use exposure holding, but if I do 'tap to hold'seems to be the least obnoxious way of doing it.

Boy, I was kind of innocent back then. Nowadays I have learned whatautoexposure locking is for the hard way and I use it reasonablyfrequently. The simple way to put it is that locking the

Once upon a time, back in the days of anime clubs inToronto, there was a particular anime club that made a lotof interesting and odd programming choices. One of them wasthat they started showing the Great Teacher Onizuka anime series, butthen partway through decided that it was too close to the manga so theyswitched to showing the live action version instead. This gave us aninteresting compare and contrast between the two, since both seriescovered essentially the same story but somewhat differently.

What I found especially interesting