Spent most of my anime time last week on season IV of DanMachi, which was pretty good all in all. It suffered a bit from being adapted from a light novel series, in that it was more a handful of juxtaposed arcs than a single overarching story, but it was nice to see Ryu get a good deal of character development, and Bell is finally starting to feel like an actual hero. There’s very little of the old hesitant, self-doubting Bell left, and good riddance. And it was nice seeing the rest of the (extended) familia succeeding without him - Aisha in particular has turned out to be a great character in her own right, and Haruhime is showing signs of what I assume is eventually going to be extraordinary power.

The only thing that really irritated me about all of that was that they got into the whole situation in the first place because nobody believed Cassandra, even after she had just proven herself by predicting the moss monster basically exactly. And Daphne in particular really needs a swift kick in the ass, because her whole attitude toward Cassandra’s premonitions not only puts the party at risk, but deeply hurts a person she claims as a friend.

Between the two cours of DanMachi IV, I took a bit of a break for Ganbare Douki-chan, which was adorable. I remember when the original was releasing, but it slipped past me initially, so by the time I became aware of it, it was already in the hundreds of chapters (one or two page chapters generally, but still). So it just went on my TBR. But the adaptation did its job - it was a perfect quick and easy break, and it led me to finally read through the original series, which was well worth it.

After DanMachi, I dipped all the way back to one that’s been on my TBW basically from the start, but that I just hadn’t yet taken the time to watch - Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou And the first OVA pair - the 1998 ones - are IMO quite simply some of the finest anime ever produced.

It’s a thing I’ve really been keyed into since watching Eizouken. The details that went into these OVAs - the simple but exquisite animations of a weather vane turning in the wind or ripples breaking across a flat stretch of water or the dappled transition from light to shadow on entering a forest - are just breathtaking. And the little incidental sounds all along the way - the ticking of a cooling engine or the creak of a gate hinge or the quiet roar of a gas flame and the rattle of a percolator lid - are just as wonderful. The whole thing is very obviously a labor of love, and the art of anime at its finest.

The second pair, from 2002, are still quite good by any ordinary standards, but they pale in comparison to the 1998 ones.

And at the moment, I’ve gone back to the search for odd gems and currently watching one I’d somehow never even heard of before called Punch Line (which I assume is a pun in Japanese). It starts with a cheesy concept of a guy who manifests superpowers if he sees a girl’s panties, but then almost immediately leaps past that into a thoroughly bizarre genre mashup meta/deconstruction… thing, alternately goofy, surreal, stylish and inexplicable. At this point (about halfway through), it’s pulling in little bits and pieces of plot from all over the place, but is actually looking like it’s going to tie it all together into… something. And if nothing else, it looks great, in a sort of bold colored, cel-shaded style reminiscent of Redline or Kill la Kill or Idaten Deities.