• Mobile Suit Gundam-san (2014)
• Gundam Reconguista in G (2014)
• Psycho-Pass (2012)
• Wolf Children (2012)
• Ah! My Goddess (2005)
• Aria (2005)
• Granbelm (2019)
• Hyouka (2012)
• Psycho Pass: The Movie (2015)
• Blue Blazes (2014)
• On-Gaku: Our Sound (2021)
• Gurren Lagann (2007)
• Kyousougiga (2012)
• Den-noh Coil (2007)
• Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (2021)
• The Battle of Algiers (1966)
• Point Break (1991)
• Tampopo (1985)
• Aim for the Ace! (1973)
• The People's Joker (2024)

I wrapped up another season of mecha anime this month, this time 2013's Gundam Build Fighters and 1996's Vision of Escaflowne. The former is a fun shonen tournament show that starts off promising with great energy and some fun characters, but it unfortunately founders a bit in the second act as it tries to become "about something." It probably should have committed to just being a fun glorified toy commercial. Vision of Escaflowne, meanwhile, is one of those shows I would see ads for on rented anime DVDs from Blockbuster when I was little, and I'm now kicking myself for not having watched it sooner. An exciting romantic drama about a girl who gets isekai'd away to a magical parallel world on the brink of war and discovers that the fortunetelling games she was known for back home seem to have significant supernatural implications. It's very refreshing to see a show like this maintain an effective drama across its runtime and pay off its narrative investments so satisfyingly, and I really think that one of its strengths is in the fact that the point of view character is not one of the mecha pilots, and therefore has a much more mediated relationship with the world's conflicts. Unfortunately the 2000 follow-up Escaflowne: The Movie didn't hit nearly as effectively for me. Perhaps with a bit more time between them I would have better appreciated its alternate take on the plot, but watching them back to back it seemed to unnecessarily muddle both the plot and visual design, reframing the protagonist's journey as a struggle with adolescent depression that is interesting in parts but unfortunately gets mostly hand-waved away rather than tackled on-screen.

We then closed out the year last night with Guillermo del Toro's 2015 gothic horror Crimson Peak. It's a visually striking movie, its costuming and set design effectively evoking a suffocating, hyper-decadent Guilded Age aesthetic, and has some great performances especially from Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain. Unfortunately their performances are so compelling that they tend to suggest a narrative depth the film doesn't really achieve, and its twists are so thoroughly foreshadowed that when it reached its moment of narrative climax it was a bit disappointing to see that there was nothing more underneath what we'd already seen. Del Toro seems to have set out to subvert modern horror tropes by delivering a stylistic throwback to the classics of the mid-20th century, but in some ways I almost feel like he subverted the wrong things, ending up with a film with all the flash and slickness of a modern production but with a story so traditional it feels a bit rote, not quite developed enough to be effective as either a romance or a horror.