ChaosTangent's Feed - Page 1 of 4

You don’t come to Nisemonogatari (lit. Impostory) for the plot or characters, you come to it to watch an art director take an LSD trip through modernist architecture and a paint-palette orgy. You come for the in-jokes and the riffs on other media. Yo...

“What are you watching?” “It’s about a rebellion and government sponsored mercenaries, but in space.” “What’s it called?” “Bodacious Space Pirates” “…” “…” “Want to watch a documentary on polar bears?” These are not today’s surly pirates who kidnap a...

On the surface Working`!! has very little going for it. Sliding off the back of the first series the second introduces no major new jokes or any characters of substance, the animation is scrappy and there’s no drama that isn’t wholly manufactured. Te...

The adage of “always leave the audience wanting more” is becoming increasingly apt for Studio Bones. Like with Bounen no Xam’d before it, Un-Go’s  creativity and, most of all, possibilities make the run-time almost criminally short. Especially when t...

Ben-to is completely crackers. And, for a while, you can believe it knows how crackers it is. Then it runs out of steam and its concept can no longer sustain what is already pretty flimsy. “why are the twins are fighting for discount food given their...

Darling of the erudites and intellectuals, Mawaru Penguindrum is a series quite unlike any other. A visual and cerebral feast, it explores the ideas of fate, of families and, as the title would suggest, penguins. Its allegories and layers however are...

Altered history Swords wrenches brooms Izumo for all Chasing the teacher Hit that for tardiness pass Yakuza revenge Maids maids everywhere Who is who, they are all girls Except for that dude Robot sings sad song Sweeps up and mans the store Sleeves l...

Pew pew pew! I’m totally a lighthouse and not an interpretation of the Tokyo Sky Tower! I’m soooooo naked! I’m so angsty I watch my pornography on the roof *POW* *BOOM* I knew I should have worn clothing more appropriate for a secret mission! Hell...

To resurrect their Blood franchise, Production I.G. enlisted the help of CLAMP to spawn the latest entry, Blood-C. Beginning like a relic of the past with stereotypical do-gooder Saya, candy-sweet twins, a mysterious café owner and flowery nonsense s...

Usagi Drop proves that good characters and a solid story never go out of fashion. It divorces itself from so many anime tropes – big eyes, sparkles, eyecatches – that it seems hard to understand why it was animated in the first place. With both the t...

I’m on a quest to understand exactly why I like the anime that I do. It’s relatively easy to enumerate which ones I like more than others, MyAnimeList exists more-or-less exactly for this purpose, but that doesn’t really explore what makes a show exc...

How do you make a series laden with references to violence, sex and bodily excretions starring two thoroughly unpleasant women entertaining? If Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is any indication, you give it to GAINAX. Suffering the same initial incr...

The third and final part of why the Production I.G. produced, Kenji Kamiyama written and directed series, Eden of the East, isn’t for you. Parts one and two are also available. 5. It’s filled with subtleties and symbolism The title is the first clue...

Part two of why the Production I.G. produced, Kenji Kamiyama written and directed series, Eden of the East, isn’t for you. Part one is also available. 3. You’re (probably) not living in a post-apocalyptic country Kanji Kamiyama did not live through t...

It was spring 2009. Code Geass had been over for many months and nothing had filled that void: a show which unified otherwise disparate fans. Production I.G. had long since wrapped up the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex project, following them...

Sometimes a specific element of a series becomes notorious, the murderous end to School Days for instance, and Yosuga no Sora (Sky of Connection) has its own as an epilogue to the first episode. Female masturbation isn’t something certain facets of a...

This is what happens when you cross effeminate young men with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. A frenzy of colour and Studio Bones’ deft creative hand is juxtaposed against incongruously suggestive female outfits and canned animation sequences. This is no...

An amnesiac girl falls to earth. Girls fight until their clothes fall off. A man stands pure and oblivious amidst a brothel’s worth of females. A beleaguered viewer has seen it all before. Take your pick from Queen’s Blade, Ikkitousen (any flavour) o...

This is the second part of my dive into some of the anime that I watched during my adolescence in the wee hours of analogue satellite stations. The first part concerned the ultraviolent Genocyber. When I began my project to relive my formative anime...

The recently released Eve no Jikan movie is a succinct and mostly successful retelling of the six original net animation episodes released between August 2008 and September 2009. Set in a future where commercial helper robots are commonplace, the tit...

Back before I can coherently remember I watched a lot of the anime that made it on to British television. The mid nineties was before DVDs were widely available and the internet was squeezed through telephone lines. I was clueless but took what I cou...

Thanks to a peppering of festival showings and a word-of-mouth groundswell, Redline already has a great start to it. Although being in production for five years might cast doubt on that. Premiering fourteen months prior in Locarno, Switzerland and tr...

Rounding out Saturday’s events for the Scotland Loves Animation Glasgow festival was the UK premiere of Trigun: Badlands – the long awaited movie sequel to the TV series which, hard as it is to believe, concluded twelve years ago. With both the movie...

Jonathan Clements introducing Summer Wars Kicking off the Scotland Loves Animation set of events was a showing of Summer Wars at the Glasgow Film Theatre. Organised by with the help from UK organisations such as Manga Entertainment, the Japan Foundat...