Short, non-spoiler reviews and hot takes of anime for the newly initiated weeb.
Now that the Rebuild of Evangelions’s own different story is rolling, the pacing is much more natural and you’ll be on the edge of your seat - or hiding behind it, I literally pulled a muscle in my neck recoiling in horror at the excellently animated action.
NGNL Zero is a strong prequel movie with a much heavier and more serious tone than the series. I was caught off guard and cried multiple times throughout. It's worth watching the series for this movie alone.
A beautifully animated coming of age vignette piece with a professional polish, but not very memorable at the end of the day.
A completely revamped and beautiful beginning to a different Evangelion story. It was so nice to see crisp HD updates and detail, with more focused storytelling with pieces of the fat trimmed out, but this first movie is mostly the same story you know.
Haruhi has its own fun thing going on. It doesn't "feel" like really any other anime, and that's part of what has made it a mainstay of anime history. That, and a very notorious arc. I really enjoyed this one.
Charlotte feels a lot like Angel Beats after the caffeine rush wears off. The lows aren't as low, but the highs aren't as high. Overall a more palatable experience with emotional moments, but still suffers from similar shortcomings.
A family-friendly Disney/Ghibli vibe that's fun enough, though definitely has "for kids" goofiness in it, but goes a bit deeper emotionally than typical non-Pixar family movies.
If you, like me, finished the main series thinking "Well, I'm not really sure what happened, but there's another movie to wrap up those loose ends" then this won't be too satisfying. While some questions are answered, it creates more than those it answers. It does have one of the greatest fight scenes I've seen in animation.
Evangelion is what made Mecha a great genre, filled with existential psychological enigmas and religious imagery. It is easily one of the most influential anime ever to have been created.
Magia Record takes the world you know from Madoka and shows us how it would be like in a bigger city full of networking Magical Girls. There is a bit of a firehose effect with the number of characters and amount of story here, though.
