Skip to content

Tag: anime

Summer Anime Season 2025: A Retrospective

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on October 5, 2025

Okay, after all that waxing angst, I thought that it would be nice to use this space to also talk about the things that make me happy that don’t necessarily involve writing and… uh… writing about them.

Anyway…

The Summer anime season just wrapped up and the Fall shows are just starting, so I thought it’d be neat to share what my spouse and I watched the last 3 months or so, which ones we enjoyed, and which were meh.

Anne Shirley

Let’s start with one that actually began during the spring season and continued through the summer. Anne Shirley is a 24-episode adaption of three of L.M. Montgimery’s Anne Novels, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island.

I never read the books as a kid or as an adult, but I fell in love with this show. Sweet and very slice-of-life in a time before smart phones, A.I. and social media. I give this one my highest recommendations for both fans of the books and complete strangers to the characters and world. It’s just so damn well done from the opening theme to animation to the pacing.

Dan Da Dan Season 2

This one was probably one of my most anticipated shows this last season, the first season completely catching me off guard and quickly becoming one of my favorites of the last 10 years by a wide margin. The second season did not disappoint, expanding the cast in interesting and fun ways while never losing focus on the true heroes in Momo and Okurun who retain their championship for most adorkable couple in anime after season one.

Momo and Okarun from Dan Da Dan anime.

My Dress Up Darling Season 2

Which brings us to the only couple with a chance to challenge for that belt in the form of Marin and Gojo. We had watched the first season after it had come and gone after seeing some positive reviews and fell in love with the characters and premise. Honestly, the best and most refreshing thing about both this show and Dan Da Dan was how they both treated their females leads as people and not eye candy or prizes for the male protagonists, which is something more Shonen and Seinen series would benefit from emulating.

Sakamoto Days Part 2

Sakamoto Days is sorta guilty pleasure shonen show for me. It’s basically what if John Wick became a family man, let himself go, and was still the worst’s deadliest hitman. It’s cartoonishly violent, features a million one-shot antagonists with weird gimmicks and a million other side characters with even weirder gimmicks. Honestly, it’s dumb. Very, VERY dumb. But like dumb in that fun way that doesn’t make you feel dumb for watching or even enjoying it. I’m AM enjoying it and looking forward to Part 3, but I’m not staring at the calendar counting down the days.

Turkey! Time to Strike

Turkey! Time to Strike was quite possibly the oddest duck this season. First off, as this was an anime original and not based on a manga or light novel, no one had any idea what the story was about until it finally aired. When the first trailer came out, it was presented as a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime about a high school girl’s bowling team with all the expected drama of both being teenage girls and being on a sports team.

So, it was only at the end of the first episode that everyone learns that the studio absolutely and completely bait and switched the audience.

It’s not a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime. Well, it is, but it’s also actually a “Time-Travel X Isekai X Cute Girls X Hobby” anime, when our five protags find themselves transported via magical pin reset mechanism to medieval Japan (The Sengoku period to be exact). From there an adventure commences as our heroes have to figure out a way back to the 21st century without wrecking the future and their possible existences.

Also, they still bowl. Like, A LOT. It’s still a bowling anime, albeit, for sometimes utterly bizarre reasons.

And it’s GOOD. Like it’s a genuinely fun watch even if you find yourself asking several times “Yeah, but why BOWLING?!” The characters are, for the most part, fun and not annoying or grating. The story itself is pretty good and even with so much potential to go completely off the rails and crash and burn before the end, it manages to actually stick the landing, though not perfectly.

Honestly, this was a bizarre and fun idea, and I can respect it for taking risks in a genre that seems strangely averse to doing such. That said, this show would’ve definitely benefitted if it had been 24 episodes (or 26, if you’re an Old-taku like me and remember when that was the standard length of almost 90% of shows). With 10 protagonists total, basically all the character development feels either very rushed or inadequate. Honestly, I almost feel like 2-4 characters were unnecessary and served no purpose other than to check off a box on the archetype checklist, which is a shame as I would have liked to spend more time with some of them to really understand them as people.

With all that said, I do recommend it. It was fun and weird and sometimes that’s all you really want. Though, I’d still like a straight up bowling anime one day.

City: The Animation

City is another odd duck. It’s a comedy and there were several times I found myself genuinely laughing hard. But there were just as many times that I found myself staring at the screen, baffled. It’s very Japanese in its humor and some of the best jokes were meta humor around anime and manga itself. I don’t regret watching it, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to everyone.

With You and the Rain

This was both a strange, and yet very grounded show. A writer adopts a stray tanuki and they cohabitate as pet owner and pet. It’s slow, sometimes sweet, and there’s always a hint of surrealism in every episode. It’s very much in the vein of The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today and if you liked that, I’d definitely recommend this.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

The last in our flock of odd ducks, we’ve got another Isekai with a bizarre premise. A Vending Machine otaku (Yes, they do exist) dies and is transported to a fantasy world as an actual vending machine. I’m always a fan of shows with bizarre premises and am happy with creators take chances. That said, I do think Season 1 was much stronger because it focused on our protag, Boxxo, learning about both his new body and the world he’s found himself in. This season, he’s pretty much established and figured out how to communicate, move, and fight and its settling into a pretty standard comedy fantasy, it’s just that the hero is, again, a vending machine. I’ll watch season three when it comes out, but it might fall into that category of shows that we watch when we don’t have a full itinerary for the season.

Kids on the Slope

This show is already over a decade old and came out in 2012, but we watched it over the last 4-5 months, so I wanted to at least bring up a few feelings I had on it.

Feeling one: I wish they would’ve pulled the trigger and actually made this a queer coming of age story set in the 60s. Then again, considering how campy they made the one queer-coded character, maybe it would’ve ended up a total disaster instead of a mild-disappointment.

Feeling two: Die in a fire, Brother Jun. You’re 60’s hipster trash along with many other kinds of trash. I hate you and I am glad I never have to see you again.

Okay, that pretty much covers the anime we just watched last season. We have about a half dozen lined up for the upcoming Fall season and a few on the back burner should we need a show to watch during our down time. If you like this kind of content, and want to see more like it, drop me an email or a DM/Comment on my Bluesky.

Comments closed

Non-book related content: Let’s talk anime (Part 1 of ?)

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on April 11, 2025

Okay, so I’ve not been shy about calling my debut book a “Ghibli-inspired fantasy” and indeed I have a deep love and respect for what Miyazaki as a creator and what Studio Ghibli has done for both animation in Japan and worldwide. It’s not a stretch to say that you don’t watch a Ghibli film but rather you experience it.

My first experience with Ghibli was in 1997 when Princess Mononoke was released. I was a freshman in college and my circle of geeky friends made the two-hour drive to the one small, independent theater (which ironically was in the neighborhood where I would find myself living with my then fiancé ten years later) to see the much-hyped cinematic experience. It did not disappoint.

And in years that followed, I tried to hunt down and watch every Ghibli film that was available, mostly through the Disney/Miramax releases, but a few were some truly awful lost dubs. Yes, the first time I saw Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was New Line Cinema’s Warriors of the Wind dub, which I would not recommend.

But my love of anime didn’t begin with Ghibli and it dates back much further. As a young child in the 1980’s, I was a die-hard fan of Voltron: Defender of the Universe, though 5-year-old me had no idea that the show originated from Japan or that it was actually called Beast King GoLion. As far as he knew, all cartoons were made in the same cartoon factory and they drew Scooby Doo & Inspector Gadget right alongside my favorite cat-themed giant robot.

My first true exposure to anime as a medium from another country and culture was in 1994 and my best friend brought over a VHS tape he’d recorded from what was then The Sci-Fi Channel during their special week-long “Animation Festival” hosted by Ralph Bakshi (of Cool World, Fritz the Cat, and Lord of the Rings fame). What the tape contained was four hours of Japanese anime that would start me on a 30+ year journey into a fandom that that has enriched my life in many unexpected and unusual ways. The specific anime that was that tape? Masamune Shirow’s Dominion: Tank Police.

Even 30+ years later, that dubbed opening still kicks seventeen kinds of ass and It’s one of the few titles in my collection where I prefer the English soundtrack over the original Japanese. Sadly, the series itself is badly dated in the sense that at the time it was created, over-militarized police who blatantly ignore both suspect’s and civilians’ procedural (and human) rights was supposed to be a dark satire. Now, it’s kinda… ugggggghhhhh.

But still, it was what kickstarted what would become a lifelong fandom for me, and I would spend the next three decades evolving from a teenaged Weeb (though that term did not actually exist at the time I was one) to a full-fledged Old-Taku. And if I hadn’t watched it, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch Princess Mononoke, and if hadn’t watched that and fell in love with Studio Ghibli, then I wouldn’t have written the debut novel that I did. So, to recap: animated movies about hyper-violent cops in tanks –> sweet, coming of age story about friendship, feelings, and food porn.

Hey, I never said it was a particularly straight path.

I’m going to end this little trip down memory lane here. I plan to pick this up again later to talk about some particular favorite anime series and films I’ve loved (and may have inspired my writing), as well as how this fandom has impacted my life. Hope you’ll come back for that next leg of the journey.

Webpage note: I have disabled comments on this and future posts. I was getting too many crypto spams, and when got one for a pro-suicide website, I was thinking that maybe there are better ways for people to tell me that they have thoughts about what I’m writing here. So, if you like my content, hit me up on BlueSky @infinitesquirrels.bsky.social.

Comments closed