Carl writes from the backwaters of Oregon, where he lives in bucolic splendor amongst talking bunnies and the occasional unicorn. He loves nothing more than having his heart stomped on by an anime series. When not slamming bad anime, he can be found singing in the forest as woodland creatures frolic about and songbirds alight in his outstretched hands.

Cardfight!! Vanguard

Rating: 1 ½

Review: Most animation is created with profits in mind, but none stink quite so pungently of crass commercialism as those with card-game tie-ins. The title alone tells you that Vanguard is among them, even before its characters start rapturously plugging the joys of trading cards, particularly those of the titular game. The plot deals with Aichi Sendou, a shy student who dreams of being a Vanguard Fighter. When part-time bully and full-time Vanguard enthusiast Morikawa steals Aichi's treasured rare card and loses it to a stone-cold Vanguard pro, Aichi braces the pro, Kai, to get it back.

In the ensuing fight it is revealed that Kai and Aichi have a connection that no one suspects, but by that point anyone over the age of, say, eight who is in possession of a functioning brain will have completely tuned out. The bulk of the episode is devoted to a tedious demonstration of the Vanguard card game that will leave even the most patient viewers with glazed eyes and an itch to beat up eight-year-olds. The remainder of the episode is consumed by character development that makes Pokémon's look positively ingenious, with a smattering of card-fightin' action. The action might remove the glaze from your eyes, but only because it gets wiped off when you roll them. The awful hair and humdrum designs do no one any favors.

Of course quality and even entertainment value aren't really the point. The point is to sell lots of cards to impressionable kids. On its success at that I cannot comment, not being an eight-year-old. I know it's bad form in this crappy economy, and spiteful even in a good one, but I'm praying it flops. Anything to impede the flow of animated infomercials.

Cardfight!! Vanguard is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gosick

Rating: 3.5

Review: How do you feed a mystery series to otaku? Dress it in loli-goth clothes of course. The tiny country of Saubure is known mainly for its prestigious school, St. Margeurite's Academy, the destination of choice for the sons and daughters of Europe's elite. Kazuya Kujo attends St. Margeurite's at the behest of his parents, but he's having trouble fitting in. His black hair and eyes have prompted the supernatural-loving students to dub him the Dark Reaper, and he's pretty roundly avoided. While looking into Dark Reaper lore at the school library he meets a pretty but very strange blonde girl. Victorique proves just how strange when a flashy police inspector bursts in with a hairy little murder mystery, which she solves in seconds. Victorique, you see, is something of a sleuth. And Kazuya is about to become her man Friday.

As a pretty diversion, you can recommend Gosick without hesitation. In addition to being cute as a button, Victorique also has an immediate and adorable rapport with the hapless, though not helpless, Kazuya, who in turn provides a light counterpoint to the often grim events surrounding them. The period European setting is convincingly evoked, with oodles of majestic scenery and worn stone architecture. The library, a marvelously improbable maze of spiral staircases and walkways built in what appears to be the remnants of a medieval tower, is a particular treat.

It's early days, however, to be recommending Gosick as a mystery series. Victorique clears up the series' first murder so quickly that she leaves no time to fairly evaluate its merits. The murder's unresolved motive does open the door to what promises to be an ill-fated cruise on an ill-fated ocean liner, but we'll have to wait for episode two to see how that fares mystery-wise. Until then we must content ourselves with looking at the pretty pictures and enjoying the cast's company. Not a bad deal, in truth.

Gosick is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Rating: 4

Review: Madoka Kaname had a dream. In it she saw a girl battling magical forces in a land of shattered skyscrapers. Battling, and losing. You can change this future, a talking animal of indeterminate lineage tells her. If you want to change it, enter into a contract with me. Become a magical girl. And then she wakes up; wakes up to her very happy normal existence, where she's just a middle-school girl with a cool working mom, a kind stay-at-home dad, and a cutie pie toddler brother. She goes to her normal—though spectacular—school, hangs out with her normal friends, and has her normal life irrevocably shattered when the girl from her dream transfers into her normal class. The shattering is completed when, at the mall, she meets the dream-animal and receives the same invitation: Become a magical girl.

A collaboration between SHAFT big shot Akiyuki Shinbo and Nitroplus scribe Gen Urobuchi, Madoka Magica also reunites Shinbo with his Petit Cossette composer Yuki Kajiura while adding the end-of-the-world vocals of Kalafina and straightforward designs of mangaka Ume Aoki. That's a frightening concentration of talent. The show that results may or may not be the Second Coming of the magical girl genre (that's for future episodes to decide), but it certainly intends to be. The production stinks of ambition, of the desire to fashion something grand and serious from the sugary bones of its ailing genre. And it has the raw skill to do it. Witness the black-and-white M.C. Escher dreamscapes; the stop-motion and live-action chaos of its nightmarish magic; the glass prisons that pass for school rooms; the Faustian undertones of the animal mascot's bargain. All of the ingredients for an unsettling revisionist take on magical-girl fare are in place. Whether it will successfully use them is another matter. Shinbo has been known to botch his shows in the past. That Madoka appears poised to skip past the usual item-gathering nonsense to head straight into internecine magical girl warfare is a good sign, though.

Yumekui Merry

Rating: 3

Review: Having a special power is always, 100% of the time, a curse. Even more so when it's as useless as a fourth buttock. Yumeji can see auras that tell him about people's dreams. Other than party favors for his school buds, there's little use for it. And lately it has been attracting some unsavory types to his dreams; namely an army of bloodthirsty bipedal kitties. After a particularly grueling kitty dream he meets a strange girl in the street. Actually, she falls on him in the street. They end up separated, but he keeps her lost hat. When the badass boss of the kitties hijacks Yumeji's waking reality, the girl, Merry, intervenes. She was just looking for her hat, but when the boss kitty lets slip that he's from the world of dreams, a place she badly wants to return to, she decides the beat him until he agrees to show her the way back.

The dreamscapes that dominate Yumeji's sleep are pretty unique. The main one involves a decaying dockside town with variable laws of physics and a sky swarming with outsized fossil fish skeletons. Add an army of Disneyesque cat-thugs and you've got yourself a nifty bit of imagination. Unfortunately that's as far as Merry's imagination goes. The rest of the episode is a hodge-podge of school-comedy and fighting clichés. How the series will shape up depends largely on which clichés eventually gain the upper hand. Since Shigeyasu Yamauchi, director of Casshern Sins and numerous DBZ movies, knows his way around an action scene, one hopes it's the fighting clichés. Merry's fight this episode is a slick piece of work, and more like it would keep us from asking pesky questions like: Why do personality-challenged protagonists always live in the same house as their smitten childhood friends? Why hasn't someone taken Yumeji's poetry-spouting friend's poetry-writing brush away and stabbed him in the brain with it? And what's up with Merry's dorky coat? A side note: the boss kitty is played with sepulchral seriousness Jouji Nakata. Hilarious. More gags like that would also help.

Infinite Stratos

Rating: 2 ½

Review: So it's the future, you see. There's these powerful robotic suits, you see. And only girls can wear them, you see. Except for one guy, you see. And he wants to go to a school for robotic-suit pilots, you see. Yes, we see. We see a cheap attempt to justify yet another story about a lone schmuck surrounded by an infinite bounty of female flesh. The guy is Ichika Orimura, and as you'd expect at a school essentially reserved for the fairer sex, he stands out like a sore thumb. Not only is he the only guy, and thus the center of undue amorous attention, but he's also the only person in his class who hasn't read the robotic-suit (called Infinite Stratos, or IS for short) manual and is the kid brother of famous IS pilot and school instructor Chifuyu. Within days he's gotten the student body's hormones a-roiling, pissed off his roommate (and childhood friend) Houki, and gotten roped into a duel with a spoiled English princess. So much for blending in.

The surprise here is that it isn't Infinite Stratos's transparent premise that sinks it. Rather it's the thinly-veiled world-building info-dumps and reams of unnatural explanatory dialogue. For all its promises of juicy school drama (or comedy), the episode feels dry, and more than a bit clunky. That doesn't bode well for the future quality of the script. As for the potentially prurient premise, it's actually pretty decently handled. While the girls are definitely interested in Ichika, they don't throw themselves on him, preferring to gawk and stalk. Fan-service is surprisingly light—limited to a bit of cleavage here and an "eek! I just got out of the shower!" moment there—and, so far at least, the moe stereotypes aren't oozing out of the woodwork. That Ichika has a personality and a spine certainly helps, as does his obvious displeasure with being the center of feminine attention. As such things go you could do worse, and certainly uglier; 8-Bit's animation is quite nice.

Rio - Rainbow Gate!

Rating: 2

Review: What can you expect from a series based on a slot machine? Apparently not much. Howard's Resort is a state-of-the-art casino city known for its flashy shows and, of course, its games of chance. Mint's grandfather has brought her to many such resorts and frankly she's unimpressed. She hears a rumor, though, that interests her, of a card dealer known as the Goddess of Victory. Like Alice following the White Rabbit, she follows a white animal in the ferret family straight to the Goddess, who proves to be a buxom young dealer named Rio. Rio is the resort's rising star, a dealer whose mere presence calms the unlucky and whose touch is rumored to bring infallible good luck. Mint is immediately smitten. And only just in time, for a ruthless stuffed-animal collector is after her beloved teddy bear Choco, and figures a game of poker is the perfect way to win it. Who better to have on your side at such a time than the Goddess of Victory?

There's only one word for Rio: ridiculous. Nothing it does makes a lick of sense. Why, for instance, would a casino—a ruthlessly profit-driven entity—employ a dealer who imparts good luck, thus costing the casino big every time she hits the floor? And who was the genius who decided that gambling was a good basis for heart-warming schlock? The scenes of Rio healing indecisive boyfriends and heart-broken divorcees with roulette and poker (and, not incidentally, lots of money) are plain icky. Ditto the scenes that try to stamp a smiley face on the desperation and greed of gamblers. And the big gambling showdown at the end, with its preposterous fantasy sequences and intimation that somehow will and intent guide luck? Ridiculous. The fan-service is excellent, mind you, and it is nice to find a series starring real-live adults, but it's hard to see this going anywhere worthwhile.

Rio - Rainbow Gate! is available streaming on Crunchyroll.