Ringtail Reviews

2020 is long since dead and gone (thank God), but I'm still pretty proud of this retrospective I wrote at the start of 2021. Here's hoping you get something out of it over a year later. Enjoy! - R - - - Time to get this out of the way: 2020 sucked, 2021’s shaping up to be only slightly better, and we’re all doing our best just to get by. Let’s get along with the feeling of hopelessness. I have now fulfilled the baseline requirements for a 2020 year-in-review article introduction. Okay? Okay.  Well, maybe not okay. Because this is a thing I'm writing about anime, and the anime this year was… not the best. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a miracle that any shows managed to get off the ground in a year that saw the entire industry uprooted and working from home. But between multiple delays, a few high-profile flops, great shows that couldn’t stick the landing, and the continued dominance of soulless mobile game and isekai adaptations, I can’t say this was my favorite year for Japan...

**This is an older review I wrote a few years ago as an experiment. It's a little long, and I don't know that I'll be returning to this exact format in the future, but I hope you find it interesting! -R In January of 1996, Sunrise began releasing the first episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team on home video. Helmed by veteran anime director Kanda Takeyuki, the show took the long-running space franchise into more grounded territory with its Vietnam War-inspired take on the Gundam universe. Yet that July, halfway through the production, tragedy struck when Takeyuki was suddenly killed in a traffic accident. The 08th MS Team stayed incomplete for several years until Takeyuki's former collaborator Iida Umanosuke came on board to finish the remaining episodes under Takeyuki's original plan.