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I'm happy to review my favorite Lupin III TV special, Episode 0: First Contact. Actually, it's one of my favorite Lupin features period, and one of my favorite anime movies. It's got everything I'm looking for in a Lupin feature: a great heist, excellent character balance, spot-on action and comic beats, a living atmosphere, good tone, and enjoyable music. It's a blast from start to finish, hitting all the right emotional notes. Fortunately, Discotek recently had this dubbed into English and put on Blu-Ray. I jumped at the chance to do a video on this.

I'm typing this in a particularly irate mood, because I'm sick, a package I've been waiting for is late (despite having paid extra to get it early), and several of my videos have been blocked on YouTube. There's not a whole lot of good tidings to give today. I'm just as liable to put a cigarette out in your eye socket. And I don't even smoke.

I've been feeling a bit better these past few weeks, so I have more motivation and ideas for videos. In this part of the review, I wanted to get a little more philosophical about the anime I'm covering, even if it is a colorful and silly series like G Gundam which doesn't exactly lean on sophisticated thinking and understanding. Sometimes even the dumbest and simplest things can jog the brain. And I wanted to be a little more creative about how I covered this.

Of course, I also had to acknowledge that I actually have the Devil Gundam in Penguinopolis' lower levels. It's used to protect the colossal city-fortress with its self-repairing nanomachines.

I'm back, people! I usually take January off, but I happened to need February off, too, because of mental health issues. It's one of the reasons I'm tackling my very real existential crisis in the opening bit of this video and probably throughout this season. But most importantly, I'm back to reviewing anime, and wanting to cheer myself up, I picked G Gundam, because it's a deliriously fun show by that master craftsman Yasuhiro Imagawa (who you may remember is one of my favorite anime directors).

2021 wasn't a lot better than 2020. There was an attempted coup in the U.S. which has so far gone largely unpunished in terms of its instigators. The COVID-19 pandemic continued. The Q people became even more deranged. China is looking to invade Taiwan and Russia is looking to invade Ukraine. And Elon Musk is still a fountain of bad ideas who still has a huge fanbase. I've personally found myself in an existential crisis as of late, and one of my few comforts is this series of anime review videos almost nobody watches. So, yeah, a real banner year.

So I sort of gave up on doing specifically Christmas-themed videos, because I couldn't really find much more Christmas-related anime to review. And it was getting old, anyway. So here's the new tradition: anime lists! This time around, it'll be on my favorite anime directors. There's no particular order or hierarchy here, just seven directors I especially appreciate.

Merry Christmas!

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As we come close to the end of the year, I want to touch upon the Lupin III franchise again, this time covering something actually good. The theatrical anime, Dead or Alive, is hardly the greatest Lupin adventure, but it's certainly one of the better ones, especially compared to the last one I reviewed, Farewell to Nostradamus. Monkey Punch himself directed this one! Well, kind of. He mostly just worked on the opening sequence and probably consulted through the rest of it, leaving the bulk of the work to the Chief Director, Hiroyujki Yano, and the rest. But it certainly has that somewhat darker, sharper Monkey Punch Lupin touch to it.

Ah, Samurai Champloo, Shinchiro Watanabe's OTHER mash up of a genre (this time, samurai period piece) and a music type (hiphop). It lives in the shadow of Cowboy Bebop, but what doesn't? It's still a pretty solid show with colorful characters and great action. It doesn't need to surpass Bebop to be good.