march comes in like a lion 1
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“You don’t have a name. You don’t have a home.”
March Comes In Like a Lion or 3-gatsu no Lion or Sangatsu no Lion is the much anticipated follow-up work to Honey and Clover. It is a coming of age story with some shogi and slice-of-life elements. It’s a story about family and what’s it like to be family and what’s it means to be part of a family. It is not something I expected Shaft do animate nor animate it fairly straightforwardly. There’s no typical Shaft being Shaft embellishments or even excessive head tilting. Just Shaft telling a solid story in a beautiful way. I can’t believe it either. And, you know what, I really enjoyed this episode.
(There is a water/drowning motif, maybe to simulate Rei’s state of mind. I don’t mind that at all. Kyoto or MAPPA would have done something similar too.)
The manga starts off a bit slow, but it picks up after Rei meets the Kawamoto family. So the anime starts with Rei already having known the Kawamoto family. Good decisions? And Shaft? Oh my. I do like Shaft trying to capture some of the pre-Kawamoto depressing Rei with the shogi flashbacks.
Another good Shaft decision? Deciding to voice the cats.
Well, Shaft did name the convenience store after the show… and put ads of the manga into the show… okay, I enjoyed the references enough to let it slide.
Loved this scene. So well done. Bravo, Shaft, bravo.
Shaft going straight and not doing weird art effects for the sake of weird art effects? Architecture that looks humanly possible? What happened? Did someone slip sedatives into Shinbo’s coffee? Shaft can still hang with the best of them even when it comes to traditional animation.
I really liked this scene. Reminds me a lot of when I miss my puppy’s dinnertime by 10 minutes, and she won’t stop hounding me until I feed her. Sometimes, after I feed her, she would paw at Fashion Czar as if she hasn’t been fed yet to get a second dinner. Yes, her schemes have unfortunately worked in the past.
Does even Harry Potter have magical cat owls? I think not. This is also how my puppy stares at me whenever she wants to play, but I’m busy doing something else like writing blog posts.
I can tell that this manga started originally in 2007 because that is a 2007-esque mobile phone. That was probably the last time anyone ever said that Japan could make better mobile phones than America. I still remember the reviews of the iPhone criticizing it for lack of features that state-of-the-art Panasonic and Sanyo phones had such as satellite TV antennas and FM radios. “Who wants or needs data when they can watch baseball using this bulky fold out antenna?”
Just fucking amazing that it was ten years ago we got Haruhi Suzumiya and the iPhone. Ten years. It feels both like twenty years ago and two years ago. Amazing. Time makes no sense anymore once you become an adult. Or have been an adult for longer than you have been a kid.
I feel like the soccer ball onigiri should gets its own commercial.
“MILK PUDDING!!!”
Is this Neko Atsume: The Anime?
Proper depiction of all grandpas. When my dad visits, my puppy is stuck on him. He carries her around everywhere, and she normally hates being carried. He feeds her apples. They would get “lost” walking around the neighborhood for hours. I thought it was just him. Then a few months ago, I saw an old Chinese man walking a Boston Terrier through the neighborhood park. I thought I had the only Boston in the area, so I went to talk with him. He only spoke Chinese, and he explained he was here visiting his daughter, who just had a kid. So he decided to take care of her dog. By the way, this old Chinese man lives quite far from the park, and I suspect they come here because it’s farther away and let’s him spend more time walking with the dog. I see the two of them walking around from time to time, and I wonder if that’s what my dad looks like walking when he walks my puppy.
Three MVPs…
1. Shaft, for controlling themselves.
2. Grandpas, for being grandpas.
3. Curry, the quintessential modern Japanese family meal.
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