I've pretty much been stuck in my house for the last three days since my driveway is now barricaded with 50 industrial trashbags full of wet sheet-rock and insulation. On the up side, I made a pretty remarkable dent in my PTW and rewatch lists. Gonna keep these pretty short, I haven't decided whether I want to write some blog reviews on this stuff yet.

Uchoten Kazoku (complete)

This show was pretty great. Not a personal favorite, but a totally solid, slickly produced little show. Of the two-dozen or so screenshots I took, a good third of them were just pictures of the moon hanging over the various skylines of PA Works' Kyoto. Even straying away from their distinctive washed-out photo-realistic backdrops, PA Works design aesthetic is too stronk. The characters are nuanced and distinctive, and remarkably human despite being mostly magical raccoon-dogs. Yasaburo is a great protagonist for this kind of story, and one of the most immediately relatable characters to come out of anime in a long time. Benten is equally great as a sort-of-not-really antagonist/love interest, as well as a near-perfect microcosm of the show's fascinating approach to character dynamics. The story itself felt maybe a little too whimsical for its own good, but I'm really glad to finally get an anime adaptation out of this author that's a little more palatable for me than Tatami Galaxy.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni + Kai (rewatch)

It's always nice to revisit a show again after a number of years and come out with almost the exact same impression that you went in with. Higurashi still looks like crap, but I love the sound design. From the endless drone of cicadas to the squishy thunks of baseball bats against skulls, Higurashi is a show that builds much of its crucial atmosphere through eerie silence and well-placed sound effects. And while the actual dialogue is so much worse than I remember it being, I have a new respect for how well-structured the story is. I used to wonder if it was really possible to work out Higurashi's big mysteries before the Answer Arcs, and after going back through it, I think it's definitely doable. The clues are subtle, and sometimes obfuscated beyond reasonable levels, but the information is more or less all there. Every clue and revelation comes just in time to build on what the audience has seen before to build to what is probably one of the most well-earned and sincerely cheesy climaxes in anime. Where the Power of Friendship is not just an abstract deus ex machina, but a deliberate and tangible consequence. Higurashi is a show that wears many masks, a labyrinth of false-starts and dead-ends, but it's also a show that knows exactly what it wants to be and how to be it. It's not pretty, or particularly graceful, but the emotional core of Higurashi makes for a definitely satisfying story, and an utterly enthralling mystery to unravel.

Neo Ranga (1-16)

Since I'm just guessing that most people will have no fucking idea what the hell this is, I'm just gonna go over some background details. Neo Ranga is character-drama/political satire in the form of a half-length-episode Kaiju anime circa 1998, and the brainchild of Shou Aikawa. Who you might recognize as the dude with script credits for such classics as Angel Cop and Genocyber. And it is a strange show for so many reasons. First of all, the truncated episode length leads to one of the weirdest structural choices I've ever seen. Ranga is paced ridiculously fast, to the point where some scene transitions are so jarring as to be actively confusing. The show will often just jump in chronology and location, with only the slightest of hints as to what the actual fuck has transpired in-between. Leaving either the audience to infer huge swaths of context, or the narrator to cryptically explain character motivations and background details. The actual story exists somewhere between Evangelion and The Iron Giant, an a "what would happen if you gave a family of developmentally-arrested teenage girls a giant pet monster" scenario. The oldest is too busy supporting the family and working to really care, the youngest is a cynically rebellious troublemaker who would just as soon use it for world domination, while the middle sister and ostensibly main protagonist just wants everyone to keep living a peaceful happy life... even if she has to flatten a few bad guys to get it. Honestly I'm none too surprised that Neo Ranga has languished in obscurity despite having pretty much all the ingredients for a cult classic. I mean, Kaiju anime seems like it should be a way more visible genre, right? Especially with a pretty sweet OP.