Catalyst Castle

This is another anime micro review. Read here for an explanation.

This anime is a sci-fi western, and it tells the story of Vash the Stampede. Vash has a huge bounty on his head for destroying an entire city. He leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, but as it turns out most of this chaos is the result of the bounty hunters that come after him. In truth, Vash is a rather comical character, and the other two main characters – two women from the insurance agency that’s had to pay for all the destruction being attributed to Vash – don’t even believe he’s the real Vash. This anime has quite a bit of action in it, but it’s really rather lighthearted and comical. It is an older anime, so the animation isn’t great, but it’s adequate. Vash is a super likable guy.

Content Advisory: Some PG13 language. Some blood in the action scenes, but nothing more graphic than that. Even the action scenes are mostly cartoon slapstick, really.

This is another anime micro review. Read here for an explanation.

In this Asian fantasy story, a brave warrior woman becomes the bodyguard to a young prince whose father is intent on having him killed. The woman’s history is a bit mysterious, but apparently she’s become a bodyguard to atone for having wrongfully killed some people in the past. The boy’s situation is a mystery as well. He seems to have gained some kind of water magic that protects him. The king’s advisers believe him to be possessed, so it has been decided he must be killed to protect the sanctity of the royal family. The boy is a bit of a whiner, but he’s not too bad. The woman seems very smart and down to earth. The animation in this series is very well done. Everything is very crisp and vibrant looking.

Content Advisory: There may be some language. (Can’t quite recall now. It was definitely less than in other series I’ve seen recently.) There was no blood or gore of any kind in the first two episodes, but it hadn’t really gotten into any serious action, so I don’t know how representative this is of the series as a whole.

The premise for this series sounded very cool. Apparently, a group of alchemists unlocked the secret of immortality hundreds of years ago, but this story focuses on their involvement in the American mafia in the 1930s. I like the idea of stories about immortals, and there aren’t too many anime based in 1930s America. The animation in this series also looked pretty good from the images I’d seen. Unfortunately, this anime is extremely gory, I guess to emphasize that the main characters are immortal. They can be dismembered or even decapitated, and they just come right back together and keep going. I only watched about ten minutes of the first episode before I decided I couldn’t watch any more. I’ll post the intro here, since that was clean and kind of neat.

Content Advisory: Some PG13 language. Lots of blood and gore. Definitely not recommended.

This is an interesting little fairy tale. It is about a duck that falls in love with a prince and is transformed into a magical girl called Princess Tutu. The setting for the story is a dance school, but a brave prince and an evil crow have escaped from a story book and broke the barrier between reality and fantasy in this town. Princess Tutu has to battle sort-of-villains that aren’t really evil in order to help the prince. The anime seems like it would be a very nice story for young girls. That isn’t an insult either, it’s just the audience I think this anime is aimed at. I found some aspects of the story interesting, but when your heroine is using moves based on ballet to fight/save her enemies it feels a little silly. The art was nothing groundbreaking, but I thought it was very nice.

Content Advisory: Can’t really say anything here. Very G-rated content. There is magic, if you find that offensive, but the fact that it’s a fairy tale should make that obvious.