Anime

Started the week off with the rest of Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined), which was great - alternately goofy, cozy and surreal.

Then I had the sort of odd experience of "discovering" a director I hadn't realized I was already a fan of - Makoto Shinkai. I just happened on Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko: Everything Flows and it was wonderful - bittersweet and heartfelt and simply beaufiful, and I liked it so much I looked up the director, and only then discovered that he had also done Suzume and 5 cm per second and Kimi no Na wa, among others. I had completely failed to notice that three of my favorite anime movies were all from the same director.

So then I went on a sort of mini binge, and watched Tenki no Ko, Kotonoha no Niwa and Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo, all of which were good, though not quite as good as his certainly not coincidentally better known ones.

Then I just sort of wandered aimlessly before ending up at Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (Dusk Maiden of Amnesia). I read the manga back in the day and remembered liking it, but didn't remember much other than bits and pieces of the plot. It was good all in all - an odd but actually plot-relevant mix of school life, ecchi rom-com with a dash of harem and full-on Junji Ito style horror.

Then, as a change of pace, I dipped back into my own past and watched Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. It's one of the first anime I ever owned (on VHS), and I have no idea how many times I've watched it over the years, but I haven't seen it since I last owned a VCR, which has to have been... at least 15 years ago. And it was just as much fun as I remembered.

And at the moment I'm watching an intriguing oddity called Scrapped Princess. At first glance, it appears to be a sort of cheesy swords and sorcery adventure story, but it's been revealing surprising depth as it goes along and has really been quite good. Remains to be seen how it plays out...