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... with Richard Thompson, not that anyone cares. ⏎White Album Season 2 ⏎ Rating: 2 ½ ⏎ Review: ⏎ The industry's habit of splitting what previously would have been a full 26-episode series into two arbitrary 13-episode seasons finds its latest victim in White Album, a series also victim to the vogue for sluggish visual-novel-based romances. ⏎ Yuki's singing career is flourishing. More public exposure, though, means less time for her alienated boyfriend Toya. And with his father hospitalized with heart trouble, he has less time for her. As the two drift apart, Toya's childhood friend Haruka drifts closer to Toya's troublesome tutoring charge Mana while she in turn continues drifting away from her neglectful show-biz mother. Life, in short, is crap all around. ⏎ Your enjoyment of White Album’s second season will depend pretty much entirely on your tolerance for humorless romances with ill-natured yet colorless male leads.  Myself, if I see one more girl crying in the snow over how empty her life is without her resident asshole, I'm going to swallow a shotgun. That said, with thirteen episodes of girls moping in snow already under their belt, anyone watching this will already know whether it's their cup of cold, bitter tea or not. ⏎ And in all honesty, amongst humorless romances with ill-natured yet colorless male leads, White Album is top-shelf stuff. It's stylish and mature; well-animated and as well-written as can be reasonably expected. Its music industry milieu is interesting (and heartlessly realistic) and its setting carefully realized (1980s Japan; dig the suitcase-sized satellite phones). It's also relentlessly gloomy and takes itself far too seriously, but if you didn't know that going in, then this isn't aimed at you anyway. ⏎ The Book of Bantorra ⏎ Rating: 4 ½ ⏎ Review: ⏎ The Bantorra Library is no run-of-the-mill book-lending establishment. It's a repository for books that have been shaped from the souls of the dead. Each is a precious testament to the lives of their creators, a priceless treasure that the Bantorra librarians are willing—and very able—to defend with lethal force. Led by ruthless raven-haired beauty Hamyuts Maseta, the “armed librarians” count among their foes a mysterious religious sect that robs innocents of their will, turning them into what the less empathetic call “Meat”. During a raid on one of the sects ships, one of the soulless encounters a fragment of a book forged from the soul of a beautiful woman who also happens to be an infamous mass murderer. ⏎ A tad confusing and hugely intriguing, Tatakau Shisho is intelligent fantasy for mature tastes: filled with tantalizing fragments of a well-realized world, anchored by a powerful, ambiguous female lead, and colored with a hint of trenchant social commentary. Sure the super-powered librarians are straight from a shonen action vehicle and there's at least one obvious info-dump, but they are minor and forgivable flaws in an opening episode full of fresh ideas and unforgettable imagery (a seaborne kamikaze assault by soul-drained minions with bombs in their flesh, a beautifully textured flashback, an empty room in which men are robbed of their humanity by a gramophone). Plus, who could resist a series whose male lead starts off as a literal lump of meat? Talk about potential for character growth. ⏎ To Aru Kagaku no Railgun ⏎ Rating: 4 ½ ⏎ Review: ⏎ Those who had the good luck or sense to watch 2008's highly polished To Aru Majutsu no Index will Misaka Mikoto, AKA “the Railgun.” She's the level 5 esper that Index’s Kamijou tangled with in episode one, and later helped out of a seriously ugly human experiment. She was one of Index’s most interesting and underrepresented characters, and the folks behind the series had the good sense (or luck) to base this spin-off series entirely around her. ⏎ With a cast composed equally of past favorites (Misaka's overly amorous roommate Kuroko) and intriguing newcomers (plucky level zero Saten), a comely balance of humor, fan-service, character and raw adrenaline, and a sleek, attractive look, Railgun is as perfect as anime action gets. The plot of this first episode is simple—Misaka meets and goes out for crepes with Kuroko and her friends only to have their date rudely disrupted by a bank robbery—but the enjoyment derived from it is anything but. Director Tastuyuki Nagai (Toradora, Honey and Clover II) has an undisputed talent for character interplay and economical emotional insight, as well as a wholly unexpected instinct for jaw-dropping action, and the series he crafts is simultaneously thrilling and heartwarming. Escapist entertainment of the highest order. ⏎ Asura Cryin’ Season 2 ⏎ Rating: 2 ½ ⏎ Review: ⏎ Less a sequel than a direct continuation of the first season, Asura Cryin’ kicks off its second season with its usual ill-blended mix of apocalyptic sci-fi, teen angst and dumb rom-com humor. ⏎ The relative peace of Tomoharu's new life is disrupted by the arrival of a koala. While washing the pool as punishment for being a boy in a shonen romance, Tomo is forced to abandon his duties when Ania follows a bipedal koala into the sewers below the school. Tomo and his usual retinue of female company go to help her and everyone ends up lost in the pipes.  With no option but to follow the koala, the group ends up in a series of underground ruins where Misao's interaction with a glass sphere triggers a flashback in Tomoharu that hints at a past (future?) that he knows nothing about. ⏎ The show's science-fiction nature has grown into a reasonable draw—throwing out moderately interesting ideas often enough to keep the series afloat—but the show as a whole still suffers from a wildly inconsistent tone. The end-of-humanity prognosticating and identity issues are an uncomfortable fit with its shiny everyanime look, and the harem situations (“Eek! You saw me getting dressed! Pervert!”) and sadly ineffectual humor detract rather than add to the series. In short, it's business as usual. The koala is pretty cool though, as are Angela's opening and ending themes. ⏎ Kämpfer ⏎ Rating: 3 ⏎...