Well, it’s over.

It goes without saying that the production is still spot on and beautiful. Even better is the fact that Seventh Heaven is essentially the vocal version of the main motif that you hear when Shiki goes into fight mode.

This chapter was a really fitting end for the entire series. We finally get our answers to just what happened four years ago. Araya really is the central villain of the series, throwing in one more roadblock for Shiki and Kokutou to overcome before they’re allowed to be happy. And Shiki and Kokutou are finally forced to confront Shiki’s murderous nature and their relationship.

It’s definitely not as epic or action packed as Paradox Spiral. This movie is much more personal than that one. Paradox Spiral was all about taking down the last boss. Murder Speculation Part 2 is about tying up all the loose ends.

One of the revelations that we’re treated to is that we’ve been following Shiki’s adventures under the assumption that she’s a murderer, when it turns out she hasn’t actually killed anyone. Her kills that we see include a bunch of ghosts, zombies, and Araya. And so, it’s really interesting to see that after all of Kokutou’s pleas for her not to kill and in the face of her own reluctance to kill, the series ends with Shiki being driven to murder someone.

is amazing.

Summer Wars was on my list of things to look out for. The first promo pictures were intriguing, with Natsuki standing in front of her family. And then the first trailers came out and that shot my anticipation up by about 2000%. In hit theatres in August and sadly, there still hasn’t been any news of a DVD/BRD release. Luckily enough, a terrible Korean-hardsubbed raw showed up on the Internets. I debated for a while whether or not to wait it out, but impatience and people going crazy over this movie won me over.

Let’s start out with the first and coolest thing we’re introduced to: OZ. OZ is essentially a much, much cooler Second Life that is actually useful beyond flying around. Every possible thing that you could think of is tied to OZ: GPS systems, utilities, emergency services, commerce, entertainment, everything. As someone who understands software design, this super-centralized system is frightening.

Now, Natsuki mentions that she’s born in 1992 and she’s 18, which sets Summer Wars in next year. I guess that’s why we’re seeing Windows 7 and DSes connect to OZ. Again, I find it frightening that someone imagined that every aspect of our lives would be intricately tied to Second Life by next year. The movie’s main plot thread starts when OZ’s security (which is apparently a 2056 digit number) is broken and an AI starts taking over. Obviously, because everything is tied to OZ, the real world is essentially thrown into chaos.

So who do we have to save the day? Mild-mannered math nerd Koiso Kenji. How does he get roped into saving the world? By getting conned by his crush, Shinohara Natsuki. Basically, she wants him to pretend to be her fiancee at her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, where her entire extended family will be gathered.

Being the unconfident guy that he is, Kenji doesn’t really do much saving at first. Much of that glory falls to Grandma, who might be the most awesome character in the movie. She demonstrates her power and her sense of responsibility, using her vast connections in the midst of the OZ crisis and by not taking any crap from one of her kids. At the same time, she’s not crazy like the head of the Sonozaki family. Her priority is her family and she’s the central figure to that family.

That family is pleasantly diverse. Unlike your standard powerful anime families, this family has members everywhere. They’re civil servants or rescue workers or businessmen or fishermen. They’ve got housewives, kids, and young adults. And what’s great about the movie is that the interactions between the family and with Kenji feel very real. Yeah, those are those annoying aunts and those cousins that you meet up with every year.

Now, honestly, Kenji doesn’t really do that much saving. I mean, he’s good at math, but the only useful thing that seems to come out of that is only factoring 2056 digit numbers on paper. He really doesn’t even do much in OZ. What he is able to do indirectly is move the rest of the family into action. He starts off very unconfident of himself, but grows through his time with this rambunctious family to the point where he’s able to take a stand for fighting this thing and by the end, does end up saving the day through math.

There’s a ton of good stuff that’s explored here. We’ve got the whole technology angle with OZ. We’ve got all of the family stuff going on. We’ve got a bunch of characters that are unsure of themselves who grow throughout the movie. And of course, there’s a budding romance that needs some growing.

One of the things that I really liked from this movie was the fact that it had so much stuff that happened in it. Usually, I prefer TV series because I find they have more time to develop their characters and carry out more elaborate plots. Summer Wars was able to have a lot of discrete events and still have it paced really naturally. I’m surprisingly satisfied with how much the movie covered.

And the visuals! Madhouse is a pretty amazing studio. Most of the movie looks like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time stuff, which is to be expected. And those parts look great. But the real eye candy is in the OZ scenes. That stuff is worth watching in Blu-ray. OZ is ridiculously detailed. There are a ridiculous number of objects in OZ and they all look great.

I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of stuff I missed out while throwing this post together, but basically, tl;dr: Summer Wars is probably the best animated work of this year.

I guess I should do what the cool kids are doing and break it down by route. I guess it’d be easier that way too, especially now that my plans to go through HF have been pushed back.

So obviously, with so many people talking about Fs/n and so many opinions about it, it was hard to get into this thing and give it a fair shake. We’ve got the whole Fate/stay in the kitchen thing, CG dragons and mana transfer, and the impression that Fate is the worst route and is terrible and is an abortion. I mean, I’d intentionally avoided the anime because I’d heard Bad Things, and so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to suffer through Fate before getting to the really good stuff.

To my surprise, Fate was actually fairly interesting. I’m actually sort of baffled by the GRAAAAGH WORST ROUTE stuff I’d heard. I mean, I guess it’s vacuously true in that it is the least good of the three routes, but I’m not sure why it inspires the sort of impassioned fury and disgust that I’ve seen. Maybe the anime really was that bad?

I’d heard beforehand that Saber was actually King Arthur and I’d expected this to be a random, thoughtless twist on something that we were familiar with. And it turns out that this twist is the thing that we spend pretty much the entire route exploring. The complications that would arise if it turned out our hero was secretly a girl, if you thought about it hard enough, are actually really interesting. And I’m really glad that the implications that arise from this premise are a pretty big part of Saber’s character.

Here, we have a heroic figure who, through her amazing powers, saved her country at the cost of her own life, both metaphorically and literally. And then we have Shirou, who wants nothing more than to have and do everything that Saber had and did. And when he finally has her power at his disposal what does he do with it? Well, nothing, because she’s a girl.

It turns out the two of them are exactly like each other. Both of them desire to save everyone at any cost, even their own lives. Shirou tells Saber to stop doing that because she’s a girl. Saber tells Shirou to stop doing that because he’s a scrub who can’t do anything. Both of them refuse because it’s the only thing they could do. Saber felt indebted to her country after she pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou felt indebted to everyone after he alone was saved by Kiritsugu. It took the two of them watching each other act in a blaze of self-destructive glory to realize that they were actually the person they were watching.

So, Fate/stay night started off pretty well for me. Well, by the end of the first route at least. Much like Umineko, I found the introductory stuff really tedious to get through. But again, much to my pleasant surprise, when things got rolling, the payoff in the interesting parts was worth it. But I have to wonder just how bad the anime is to cause such loathing for this arc. I can’t really imagine Fs/n without it.

I’m not entirely sure what to say about Cencoroll, but it’s the sort of thing that makes you feel like you should give it a mention. It’s certainly impressive that most of the work that made this happen was put in by one guy. Most of my preconceptions of the movie were from the related tracks on supercell’s 「君の知らない物語」 single.

Basically, the entire thing is an excuse to watch monstrous blobs do weird things and fight each other. Not that that’s not entertaining. It’s pretty awesome seeing Cenco turn into various things like a car or a giant staple gun and have him just stare at the characters for a bit. The reason that that’s all the movie boiled down to was because it was just too short.

I mean, there’s tons of stuff that was really interesting that could have been expanded upon. The whole antenna-ahoge controlling the monsters and the mechanics of the monsters, some more about the characters, and tons of other stuff that weren’t explained are all fertile ground for more stuff we could have seen.

Since it’s only thirty minutes, it’s worth taking the time to see. Again, it’s pretty neat and I’d be surprised if someone who didn’t know about it would be disappointed by it. The worst thing about it really is that there isn’t any more.