Chatty AF 132: 2020 Fall Wrap-up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Dee, Chiaki, and Peter look back on the Fall 2020 season!
Dee, Chiaki, and Peter look back on the Fall 2020 season!
Fall featured a lot of hotly anticipated titles from well-loved creators, but which managed to stick the landing?
The main question that both myself and other natives had after the release of Coco was, “who gets to tell indigenous animated stories without us being in the room?” These are the questions I asked myself while waiting for premiere for Onyx Enquinox; and after having seen the first episode, it left me feeling angry and tired.
Dee, Chiaki, and Peter check in on the Fall 2020 season, from demon girls to sleepy gremlins!
There’s too darn many anime this season. Some of them are even really good! The team did their best, resulting in our longest check-in post ever.
D4DJ is like a swig of energy drink. It’s fun, colorful, high-octane, and I can already tell I’m going to have Rinku’s beloved dance track stuck in my head for the whole weekend.
While it has the most generic Fantasy Oppression setting imaginable, the very emphatically capitalized MAGATSU WAHRHEIT knows exactly how it looks—and it’s unexpectedly sly at playing with those expectations.
A stunning premiere that showcases the main cast while hinting at a wholly optomistic plot that welcomes newcomers and seasoned fans to enjoy a new entry to the Love Live! franchise.
If Summer was thin, then Fall’s made up for it by being absolutely packed to the gills with titles of every stripe!
Dropout Idol Fruit Tart, like the sweet treat in its name, is bright and sugary, but probably does not contain much nutritional value… and in fact might make you feel a bit off if you consume too much of it too quickly.
It took me two days and no less than four separate attempts to make it all the way through Maesetsu’s 24-minute first episode.
This first episode is such an eclectic mix of plot points and character beats that I suspect everyone is going to have a different reaction to it. My advice? Go watch it. At worst, it won’t make you angry, and at best, it may just charm the leotard off of you.
When the writing is willing to shut up and breathe, it unearths a kind of camaraderie in the face of despair that I have no doubt it plans to return to. Unfortunately, those two minutes are preceded by 20 minutes of noise.
The tone is soft, the art is gorgeous, and it’s never afraid to dive a step to the side of realism in the name of visual metaphor or setting up atmosphere. And yet, at the same time, this premiere is oddly and satisfyingly down-to-Earth. The dreamlike visuals go hand in hand with the subtle characterization, even if they—like the characters themselves—might seem at first like an odd couple.
Akudama Drive comes in like a robot boxer: moving fast, swinging hard, and covered in LED lights.
A beary cute fantasy premiere that showcases charming animation and promising characters, but is ultimately threadbear on plot and sadly, bear-ly leaves a mark with its unfortunately okay first episode.
Apparently the market for manhwa adaptations is considered unreliable enough that we are now here, staring down the barrel of a 2020 anime based on a series that began running in 2007 (and was in fact, the first Webtoon title translated into English) and feels every inch its age.
Our Last Crusade feels more like an MMO world that refuses to admit it’s just the Light Novel author’s MMO fanfiction.
It’s not a terrible premiere, but it felt like the series was more interested in throwing us into the chaotic world of Ikebukuro without establishing why we should care about any of these characters.
Yes, Moriarty the Patriot is terribly competent, and that is its greatest failing.