“ It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia but make it schoolgirls” is the pitch I usually use for this series, though that fails to fully encompass what makes it so stellar. Plot Summary : The three members of the Pastime Club love to hang out after school and play games this is the chronicle of their club activities. The 11-minute short format has been going out of style since Honda-san aired, and it’s all the more disappointing that such an excellent example of the format might slip into obscurity. The writing strikes an admirable balance: while Honda is intensely anxious about social interactions, his customers are more clueless than cruel, and there’s a seed of optimism in the way characters connect over books and while the source material is semi-autobiographical and clearly coming from a place of affection, it also avoids romanticizing hellish tasks like order day and visits from upper management. Plot Summary : A very tired skeleton relates the daily highs and lows of working in a popular Japanese bookstore.īite-sized and deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked retail, Honda-san ’s borderline Flash-level animation is proof that a big budget isn’t always necessary to make a series engaging. At least the manga is still going strong… if you’re comfortable reading it in Japanese. In fact, this one got insulted twice: its home video sales were abruptly cancelled in Japan as well. Which makes it all the more depressing when a genuinely fun supernatural action title like Phantom in the Twilight crops up, only to be left without a physical release. There are a wealth of similarly cheap titles with potato-faced male leads and a gaggle of fawning ladies too, but they somehow seem to avoid the overwhelming dismissal that sticks to reverse harem and otome shows like glue. Reverse-harem anime get a bad rap, not least because many of the genre’s most recent entries are based on mobile games and saddled with miniscule budgets, often resulting in a thinly drawn heroine and stiff-looking visuals. Plot Summary : Ton travels to London along with her best friend Shinyao in hopes of following in her great-grandmother’s adventurous footsteps, only to have her luggage immediately stolen and find herself embroiled in a supernatural conspiracy. Here are nine titles that newfound windfall of Sony money can and should save with a Blu-Ray release…with a sad tip of my hat to titles that had their video rights purchased by smaller companies - like The Eccentric Family Season 2 (NIS America) and Samurai Flamenco (Aniplex America) - only to be left to gather dust. Physical media remains one of the few reliable sources of archival in a world where licensors can pull titles without warning, as any longtime anime fan’s straining shelves can tell you. However, between Funimation’s reluctance to put out physical releases of titles without English dubs attached and the much lower ratio of licenses-to-Blu-Rays put out through the Sentai partnership, a lot of excellent titles have ended up in the precarious position of being streaming-only. During their partnership with Funimation, the latter would provide dubs and DVDs for profitable streaming titles at present there is a similar but far less robust arrangement between Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks. While Funimation originally did the majority of its business by selling anime on home video and has kept that side of its business going, Crunchyroll has no in-house video distributor. And while there are many questions to be asked in the wake of the merger - will this lead to improvement of both companies’ somewhat stagnant apps, will the stranglehold on the market lead to a gouging of monthly fees, and will that potential price raise do anything for the alleged underpayment of translators? - the discerning modern consumer knows that the most important question is, “how can this benefit me, personally?” While there are still a handful of outliers, including Netflix, classic title refuge RetroCrush, and niche holdout Sentai Filmworks, Sony has essentially secured a monopoly on the world of seasonal anime streaming. Sony recently announced its acquisition of streaming webservice Crunchyroll, in a move that brings the majority of western anime streaming under one roof.
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