The beginning of something new

And something new beginning, almost every single time means that something needs to end. In this case, I will stop updating this blog. Kori’s Anime will stop being updated and instead I will be moving over to a new website! The reasoning behind this, what I plan to do in the future and some more you can find right here!

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while and it’s finally come to it! I want to thank all of you readers for having stuck with me for the past 3 years and I hope you come and read my new Blog as well.

Hai to Gensou no Grimgar

Grimgar feels personal. I’ve written about 4 or 5 introductions at this point explaining the background of this show, why Light Novels are assumed to be bad nowadays, how surprising this show was to everyone, but none of them really feel like they do this show as much justice as this sentence. No, “it feels personal” really doesn’t say much at all, but it’s the wording that fits my thoughts on the show the best and in a way, trying to put these odd feelings I can’t explain properly into words is the point of this blog anyway, so here’s my try to explain my love for Hai to Gensou no Grimgar.

Pepper Anime Festival 2016

Yesterday I had the chance to visit the Pepper Anime Festival 2016 here in Germany. So first off, what exactly is the Pepper Anime Festival? Once a year the german Anime licensor Peppermint Anime organizes a festival in around 7 cities and shows a lot of Anime movies there. Although I wasn’t able to attend last year, I was able to this year and thanks to this blog right here, even managed to get a press ticket. So this post here will be about my experience made at said festival and what I thought of everything!

So first of all I think it’s necessary to say that watching movies in theaters greatly enhances the experience of almost any movie you could be watching. Having 200 or so people sitting around you all watching the same movie with you is a completely different atmosphere than it is to sit at home in front of your TV. Constantly having share the exact same emotions you are feeling and hearing other people around you react to it is an amazing experience and if you’ve never experienced Anime in theaters, I highly recommend you to do so some time!

12 Days of Anime: Wrap-up

Well I guess that was more time-consuming than I thought it was gonna be. Of course I didn’t write every one of these posts the day I published them and had most of them prepared somewhere but I was actually expecting to spend 5 minutes everyday writing something random, but for some of them thinking about what I wanted to write was actually quite hard. Add to that, that I don’t actually remember a whole lot about some of the shows I wrote about these past few days….

That said I’m almost kind of sad that I wrote about so many shows over the past few weeks and none of them really got the treatment that I wanted them to get. I would’ve loved to write a 4 page essay on why I love Euphonium so much, but I guess that’s not really gonna be possible in this format. There will most likely be more coverage for some of the shows that I talked about on the 12 days of Anime though!

Anyway, so now that after 3 years of trying, I finally managed to complete the 12 days of anime, though this time not in video form. I have to admit just writing blogs about this really is much easier than making an entire video surrounding it, since making a video really does take a lot more work than just writing something. I did have quite a bit of fun doing these though and I guess it was pretty good for my blog as well considering I’ve had a lot more readers thanks to these haha

One more thing: Someone a few days ago told me how they were surprised I ranked one thing higher than the others so I want to be sure that everyone understands this really quick: This is not a top-list or anything, this is merely a list of things I enjoyed from the past year of Anime in no particular order. (though I did try to do my favorites (Gatchaman, Euphonium and Shirobako) towards the end of the list)

Oh well, that’s all I really wanted to say so I hope that you enjoyed this little project and let me know what I could improve and what else you’d like to read about in the comments! Thanks for sticking with me over the last 12 days and I wish you all a merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

12 Days of Anime: Day 12

Originally today, the last day, was going to be just a quick look back on how I liked 2015 as a whole, but I watched a certain something recently that I do want to mention after all, so here’s my quick thoughts on 2015 in a nutshell: I didn’t think it was overwhelmingly amazing, but there were quite a lot of shows that I really did enjoy and I thought the year was definitely pretty good. Now on to the thing I wanted to talk about.

Just a few days back I finally got around to watching a show, I’ve been wanting to watch for quite a long time already. Yoru no Yatterman‘s first episode was absolutely fantastic. In fact, I’d say it was the best first episode I’ve seen this entire year, so much so that I almost wish it wasn’t connected to the series as a whole, as I’ve unfortunately heard quite a lot about how it continues and what I heard I am not quite pleased with. Anyway what exactly does make it’s first episode as good as it is? Well for once it’s very good at subtly characterizing the people’s we’re supposed to care about. Leopard herself is absolutely adorable and within just this episode where a lot of the time, she’s not even able to speak properly, she already becomes a better character than most I’ve seen in recent airing shows by the end of the series. Another thing about it is the way it builds it’s atmosphere. Over the course of the episode, the color pallet starts out very dark and gritty to present the rather sad atmosphere and brights up over the course of the episode, only to just get darker again. Add to that some fantastic animation and character acting to express what the character feels and a Soundtrack by Tatsuya Katou that’s more than capable to convey the emotions behind the show and you get an absolutely brilliant episode.

Of course that is not all that factors into this, but these are the major points and that’s all we have time for for now and I will (maybe) see you tomorrow for a little wrap-up on the 12 days of Anime!

Merry Christmas!

12 Days of Anime: Day 11

It’s finally the time to talk about a moment in Anime or an entire show in itself for one last time, before we reach the conclusion tomorrow where I’ll be talking about the year as a whole! The show I talk about today is one that’s been incredibly close to my heart ever since it first aired earlier this year and I’ve since then already rewatched and am still falling in love with it even more on a daily basis. Hibike! Euphonium has resonated with me more than any other show this past year and I’ve come to be incredibly passionate about almost everything it has to offer. Be that it’s characters, it’s animation and especially it’s themes. As I’ve stated numerously throughout this entire project, passionate characters as one of the main parts of a show is something I absolutely adore and Euphonium pulls this off perfectly. Hell, the story itself is for the most part about Kumiko trying to find a passion for herself and her relationship to the incredibly passionate Reina. I’m not going to go into too much detail on what else the series has to offer and why exactly I love it as much as I do and will hopefully leave that for another post in the future once I’ve rewatched the show another time.

Let it just be known for now, that Hibike! Euphonium is an absolutely incredible show in almost every facet and I would most definitely see it as my favorite show of the entire year.

12 Days of Anime: Day 10

We’re slowly coming to an end with the 12 Days of Anime, with this being the second to last actual post about an Anime I watched and tomorrow’s post talking about my favorite memory of the entire year and the last one dealing with the year as a whole!

A few days ago I talked about how Bakuman was the Manga that first got me interested in the industry itself. If Bakuman was the thing that got me interested, Shirobako really sealed the deal in making me passionate about the production of japanese animnation to the point where I now want to be able to work in the industry myself in the future.

Shirobako itself is incredibly close to my heart for several reasons. For once of course, it’s incredibly endeering characters, the relationships it establishes between them, Miyamori’s struggle to find a reason to work, the storyline between getting a production done, it all just works and is insanely rewarding to watch. The one thing that really sold it to me was the passion behind every single one of it’s characters. Watching characters be passionate or finding a passion is one of my favorite things and Shirobako did it perfectly and for that reason and many many more, it has become one of my favorite shows.

12 Days of Anime: Day 9

This is another show that I actually haven’t managed to finish yet, but Gatchaman Crowds is a show so good, there is no way around it for this segment. Not only is it the year that I finally own the first season on Blu-Ray, but also the year that we were finally blessed with a sequel and oh god did it live up to the hype everyone had built up for it. Gatchaman Crowds: Insight was one of the most thematically filled shows I have seen so far, ranging from Individuality, the importance of arguments and much much more and the best thing about it, it dealt with pretty much all of them incredibly well. None of them were forced, none of them felt out of place, it just fit with the story itself.

The character writing itself was amazing as always. The characters you were supposed to like, you loved. Characters you weren’t supposed to like you didn’t like, but you didn’t hate them either as the show always was considerate enough to explain everything about their point of view to you. Hajime herself is energetic as always and although most of the season just kind of feels like we are waiting for her to take action she was once again absolutely amazing and probably one of the very best characters of the entire year. This becomes even better when looking at her relationship to a particular returning character from the first season, which I found to be absolutely amazing.
In short: Gatchaman Crowds Insight was one of the very best shows of the year and of the past years as a whole and if you have not checked it and it’s first season out yet you are, like many others, seriously missing out!

12 Days of Anime: Day 8

A few days ago I was talking about a certain director I happened to very much enjoy during the year of 2015. Rie Matsumoto really has been rising to fame with this year’s Kekkai Sensen and with very much reason at that! She’s one of the absolute best directors in the industry and one of the greatest creative minds, but Kekkai Sensen wasn’t actually the show she first showed that in! Kyousogiga actually already aired about 2 years ago in the Fall Season of 2013, but only this year, I finally got around to watching it and I was absolutely blown away. The cinematography within the show, the atmosphere created through with the great Soundtrack and the Story itself! It all blended together to make one of the greatest memories I’ve made in Anime so far!

I have to admit here I don’t actually remember the exact details of Kyousougiga as I did watch it very early on in 2015 and it very much is time to rewatch the show soon, but I remember being stunned by it’s sheer beauty and the way it told it’s story and that by the end I was left with incredible satisfaction by a show that really is looking for it’s equals as one of the very best in recent years and one that definitely needs more recogniation!

Go watch Kyousougiga! (If you have already, go watch it again)

12 Days of Anime: Day 7

First of all I’ll have to admit that I have barely any experience in terms of cooking at all. All I’ve ever really done is cook with my parents once or twice and from time to time with some friends and while I surely did have fun with it I can’t say I have much expertise on it. That said, luckily much like with sports Anime, talking about cooking in Anime is actually possible without knowing anything about it and that’s probably one of the reasons why I loved Shokugeki no Soma as much as I did. The show was as a whole pretty much nothing different from your usual sports show. It’s intense, it’s exhilarating and it’s exactly what I wanted it to be. The first half may not be as good and I was actually relatively close to dropping the show, the the second half made more than up for it. At a certain point the show just clicked for me and all of a sudden I was incredibly invested in the characters and all it took was a character rivalry, a loss for our main character and some further introduction to side characters. By the end of the show I was so engrossed with everything the show had to offer it actually got me to cry several times within a single episode and of course that isn’t an absolute indicator of quality or anything, but it is an indicator of just how much I ended up investing in the show and I really did get a lot of fun out of it.