An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Mechanical Malfeasance – Casshern Sins Spoiler Review

Can a franchise undergo depression? The groundwork for Casshern Sins suggests… maybe.

The franchise started with a 1973 outing called Neo Human Casshern. I haven’t chewed through it in its entirety by any means, but a little basic groundwork lets you know that it’s pretty typical Saturday Morning Cartoon fare. Its premise, amusingly presaging the MegaMan franchise, involves a scientist’s son becoming a super-cyborg in order to battle a rogue robot that’s trying to take over the world. In 1993, the franchise would reinvent itself with the OVA Casshern: Robot Hunter, which has some darker style notes as were all the rage in the 90’s.

But then in 2008, we got another retelling of the Casshern story. Its title, if you couldn’t guess, was Casshern Sins. Robot Hunter maybe wanted to be a little more adult than Neo Human. Sins, if the title wasn’t a dead giveaway, wants to take a premise that had some dark elements to it and turn that premise into an apocalyptic nightmare where only death and mayhem await.

While I might dig into the older Cassherns at some time in the future, Sins is by far the best known outing (at least in the West) and so it’s where I intend to start.

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Magical Misfire – The Witch and the Beast Spoiler Review

You know what? It’s spooky season and I haven’t covered even one remotely spooky show. Enough (for now) of these cutsey witches and their kind hearts, you deserve at least one entry where the idea of a “witch” lives up to having a place on monster line-ups.

The show that promises that is The Witch and the Beast.

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God Hates Witches – Maria the Virgin Witch Spoiler Review

Well, when talking about witch shows, this is one that seems prudent to tackle. Though released in 2015, Maria the Virgin Witch is one of two war-time witch outings that tend to come up. I guess it has been over ten years now, but the show feels older than it is in a good way, like it impacted public consciousness. That said, I at least didn’t know much about it other than that it existed before digging in, so with this minimal preamble, let us do just that.

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To Life – Once Upon a Witch’s Death Spoiler Review

This is a show that legitimately scared me, when I was just approaching it. Not because it was conventionally scary or even related to the horror genre, but because it had some creative DNA that I know backfires far too often.

This is the pitch for Once Upon a Witch’s Death: on her seventeenth birthday, apprentice witch Meg Raspberry is told that she only has a year left to live before a horrible curse claims her. There is an out, but it’s not easy: she needs something called a Seed of Life, and according to her mentor, the only way to make one of those is by collecting a thousand tears of joy in the time Meg has left.

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Mushroom Soup for the Soul – Champignon Witch Spoiler Review

It is once again spooky season, and this year that’s going to mean one thing: witches!

I love the witch archetype in anime. Terrifying, adorable, or anywhere in between, these magical girls (who may sometimes overlap with Magical Girls) and their usually sizable hats just seem to hit the right notes for a lot of folks, myself included, and we’re here to honor them this month – and we’ll start by putting the “fun” in “fungus” (or so I hope) with Champignon Witch.

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