This series goes out for all the gamers out there that are also into anime. Shangri-La Frontier recently finished airing the first season and I must admit it was, well, pretty good for its genre. For anyone who wants to comment on the fact that it feels like a Sword Art Online wannabe, I will…
Category: Animation & Comics
Webtoons – No party, more XP
With the first season of Solo Leveling in full throttle, I wanted to share a little insight on some themes that it touches and possibly explain why it became so popular. Some Technical Details Solo Leveling is a web-novel or webtoon/webcomic written by Chugong and illustrated by Jang Sung-rak, serialized between 2016 and 2018….
Night, the time of freedom
Call of the Night is a manga written and illustrated by Kotoyama; it premiered in 2019 and just recently, at the end of January, ended after 200 chapters. It is a peculiar piece of work and in my opinion, it is hard to confine to a single genre: it is much about growth as it…
Zombie-19 pandemic
Quick question: did you ever hear any of your friends just saying point blank “Man, I miss the lockdown period/COVID”? Afterwards they usually proceed to explain that obviously they don’t mean the full two years, but just a month or two – working from home, unwinding , getting some rest in. Just imagine how distorted…
Virtual Beauty
Belle – also known as Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime (which translates to The Dragon and the Freckled Princess) – is an animation movie that premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It is one of those movies that in my opinion passed under the radars and deserves some praise. While the movie could be…
Not quite Overlord
Hear me out, I know that previously I already addressed several themes of Isekai and reverse Isekai without ever actually writing an article on the genre and its evolution, but to be fair there are people out there who did this way better (thinking at you Gigguk, the Isekai gigachad – you da real MVP)….
One Ghost, scrambled
Mardock Scramble is an anime movie (divided in three parts), adapted from its homonymous light novel. It presents some very thought-provoking scenarios and deals with crude themes such as rape, suicide, murder and the ontological dilemma of the worth of a life. It behaves somewhat as a noir and a murder mystery narration, while also…
Spins on Stampedes
It has always difficult to take a classic and try to give it a different spin, even more so in anime. This approach thrived on occasion and for various reasons: think for instance of Hellsing Ultimate (which to be fair, the OAV was just a better visual overhaul) or for the innovative style in JoJo…
Of Ojisans and Isekais
The Isekai genre This is not going to be an in-depth or exhaustive article on the anime genre itself since that would lead me to open too many parenthesis and I would probably end up wasting too much space. I will however give a brief overlook on this subgenre to at least make you understand…
Of androids and men
There are several significant differences between robots and androids: while the former tend to be conceived only as mechanized (sometimes humanoid) constructs with specific functions and no capabilities for emotions, the later tend to be more advanced (thinking for instance about A.I.). We might think of androids as a new stage in technological evolution, constructs…