Manwhores, Art, and Japanese Practice: Summer Time and the Spring Anime Season

The ladies by the pool and beach are an excellent indication of what season it is…

Ah… Three weeks removed from my 6th semester of college, I’m finally ready to put some things down on this site once again. There are some reviews (Spice and Wolf, Shigofumi, Hatenkou Yugi, True Tears, Clannad) still left on the draft table, and between the three of us, we’ll have to discuss whether or not any of those will be worth presenting at this point. But the winter season is so 7 weeks ago, right? So let’s put that aside and start talking about Spring 2008.

Review - Dragonaut: The Resonance

I think the best piece of advice my engineering economics professor gave us about presentations is that the thing most listeners will remember about your presentation is how it starts, and how it ends. With that piece of information in mind…

Dragonaut: The Resonance

Plot Summary

A shuttle bound for the moon is destroyed by “asteroids” upon takeoff. Fast forward 2 years. Kamishina Jin, the lone survivor of the accident, meets a mysterious girl named Toa, a brash introvert Gio, and a cryptic subdivision of the International Solarsystem Development Agency (ISDA) known as the Dragonauts. He learns the truth behind the accident that took his family two years ago, and the potential impending doom to befall humanity. Against the odds, can Jin and Toa set things right and save humanity?

With a touch of class.. Sakura Sunday with the JASGP

5 cm per second got’s nothing on real life.

If you’re a regular to Anime Academy (And if so, many thanks for supporting us!), then you should know that we love to take ourselves outside the boundaries of anime. So when the annual Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival, organized by Japanese American Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP), with the highlight Sakura Sunday event rolling in last Sunday, my excitement was palpable (when I wasn’t bogged down with this, that, and the other thing for that matter anyway). Even if peanut (kame) and bro-ham choosing not to come down to check it out as well, I wasn’t going to let that rain on my festival (even if it was forecasted to, literally, rain on the festival). Anyway, I’m back, with pictures (mega thanks to my friend Greg for letting me borrow his camera), ready to talk about the culture behind the subculture. Let’s start!

Dual Review - Minami-ke Okawari

Minami-ke Okawari:

Plot Summary

Minami-ke Okawari continues from where its first season left off. More stories about the lives of the three Minami sisters, Haruka, Kana and Chiaki.

Review - H2O ~Footprints in the Sand~

In my honest opinion, I happened to think we were too generous with our reviews in the for the fall 2007 season. There are a lot of rationally justifiable reasons for why that’s the case: we were new to the blog scene, we haven’t done reviews before, etc. So the game plan for winter 2008 was to be a little bit more critical of what we watched. I took on the added initiative to pick a very assorted collection of anime to watch and review this season, including some that I would not normally watch had it not been for this blog. All of this so that I could develop, in some sense, the difference between a good anime, a mediocre anime, and a poor anime. There were some surprises, and some disappointments, but as is lots of forms of art. Anyway, with that preface defined, let’s get started on Winter 2008:

H2O ~Footprints in the Sand~

 

Plot Summary: Takuma Hirose is a high school student who moves into his uncle’s rural village carrying some emotional baggage. Blind for some unknown reason, Takuma begins to interact with the abrasive Hayami Kohinata, the endearing Hinata Kagura, and the mystical Otoha, the latter of the three giving him the gift of sight. With this newly acquired, but temporal, gift, can Takuma right the social injustice carried on from the previous generation to the present?