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Monsters in Wonder Egg Priority Episodes 1-4
“There’s nothing to be scared of. They only come after me.” Kurumi Saijo, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 1 The gathering of Ai Ohto, Neiru Aonuma, Rika Kawai, and Momoe Sawaki under a streetlight at the...
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Flowers for Neiru Aonuma (Wonder Egg Priority Episode 5)
Although Neiru Aonuma has been a constant of Wonder Egg Priority since the series’ second episode, she’s rarely been a series focal point. Rika Kawai and Momoe Sawaki each received their own...
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Ai Ohto’s room and safety in Wonder Egg Priority
Private rooms and home decor can be used in pointed ways to tell us more about the characters they belong to and Wonder Egg Priority once again seems to be borrowing a lot from Kunihiko Ikuhara’s...
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The Kunihiko Ikuhara school for teachers (why Wonder Egg Priority’s Sawaki is...
Is Shuuichirou Sawaki all that bad? I’ve seen this question asked fairly frequently as Wonder Egg Priority has continued to air. Sawaki, who is protagonist Ai Ohto’s teacher and visits her house...
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Flowers for Rika Kawai and notes on flower language in Wonder Egg Priority...
While the garden of Aca and Ura-Aca places the four leads of Wonder Egg Priority against various floral backdrops to hint at their moods and personalities, Rika Kawai’s otherworldly flower field...
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Flowers for Momoe Sawaki: Wonder Egg Priority Episode 10
Momoe Sawaki’s addition to the Wonder Egg Priority cast in the series’ fourth episode also introduces two major hiccups to the series’ narrative. The first — and seemingly at the time, more pressing...
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Daisies, Camellias, and how Wonder Egg Priority frames Shuuichirou Sawaki
The most contentious character in Wonder Egg Priority continues to be Ai Ohto’s teacher, Shuuichirou Sawaki. Outside of what exactly is going on with Aca and Ura-Aca’s seeming quest for immortality,...
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Flower language in Wonder Egg Priority Episode 11
Wonder Egg Priority has always paid specific attention to lighting when Rika Kawai is onscreen. In the midst of her many quips about how she would look beautiful in a flower field but others wouldn’t,...
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Colors and Cinematography in SSSS.Dynazenon
The opening shot of SSSS.Dynazenon is purposefully reminiscent of its predecessor, SSSS.Gridman. Anyone who has watched Gridman immediately will recognize the sequence of shots. This time, these...
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The flowers of Wonder Egg Priority’s opening (and series reflections, I suppose)
Following a three-month wait for a finale that was half-recap and half-nonsense, Wonder Egg Priority will go down in anime history as yet another promising passion project that was stymied by poor...
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What we leave behind: On returning to Maid Dragon
Yasuhiro Takemoto left behind a legacy. There isn’t an artist in the world who doesn’t think about how people will view their art. If they say that they’ve never thought about this, then they’re...
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Welcome back to Love Live!, Takahiko Kyougoku (visual direction in Love Live!...
The opening sequence to the original Love Live! School Idol Project still charms me to this day. It was made back when Love Live! was a budding multimedia adventure and not the successful franchise it...
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Costuming in Sailor Moon (Part 1: Le Smoking and Tuxedo Mask)
Was this post inspired solely by the fact that Tuxedo Mask has an attack in the manga called “la smoking bomber” and reading way too far into that? You decide. A brief history of Naoko Takeuchi and...
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Hundreds of ways to say hell is other people and also love is other people:...
There are myriad reasons why I feel unqualified to talk about anything related to the Evangelion franchise, but the primary one is that it’s not my thing. It’s a lot of other people’s thing, but not...
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Flower language in Heike Monogatari
“The color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.” -The Tale of the Heike During her time at Kyoto Animation it was a truth universally acknowledged that any Naoko...
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Art Nouveau and Art Deco in Arcane
Two specific points struck me as I was watching the first three episodes of Arcane. The first was the series’ use of a “camera.” Animation, by nature, unchains the camera view or perspective from...
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The “Anicamera” in Arcane
Arcane immediately had my attention due to the way in which it used its own “camera” to frame its first act, in addition to other visual languages used in tandem with the series’ emotional narratives....
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Visual bookending, mirroring, and storyboarding in Arcane
Am I interrupting? Spoilers for all of Arcane and some League of Legends game lore/backstory below. Tw: suicidal ideation Sometimes, when people speak of anime or animated works (especially the...
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Return to the Abyss — Made in Abyss: the Golden City of the Scorching Sun,...
“About 1,900 years ago, a huge pit was discovered on a remote island in the southern sea of Beoluska. With a diameter of around 1,000 meters and a depth that is still unknown to this day, the...
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Tanaka’s Camellia Flowers — Odd Taxi Episode 4
“I feel like I’ve always been searching for something. At the same time, my life has always been lacking something. And desperately acquiring that something yields only a moment of pleasure.” -Tanaka,...
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