Anime Club Continues in 2025!

For the month of March, the screening will be on Friday 3/21 at 5:30pst!

Last year we met once a month to watch through Katanagatari, Samurai Champloo, and Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran together, in keeping with the original broadcast schema of Katanagatari. People seemed to like this, so I have prepared a new slate of shows for 2025!

Headlining is a harebrained chronological screening of Hidamari Sketch! We'll be checking in with Yunocchi and friends throughout her first year of high school to see what they've been up to that month.

Over the course of the series' four season run, we're treated to a front row seat to both the personal growth of Yuno and friends as they develop their senses of identity, as well as the growth of Studio SHAFT itself, as they developed and refined aspects of their house style they would go on to employ to great effect in later works such as Bakemonogatari, Madoka Magica, and many others.

Backing that up, I've picked out a few other shows to accompany it, following a theme of highly stylized slice of life and teen drama shows:

  • Kare Kano is a personal favorite that I think showcases a lot of what makes both Anno-era and post-Anno Gainax great.
  • SoreMachi shares the talent of director Akiyuki Shinbo and studio SHAFT with Hidamari, and has been on my personal to-watch list for quite a while. It features maids! We love maids, right?
  • Super Gals! is a frenetic dash through youth subculture in early 2000s Shibuya, featuring lots of highly era specific language, fashion, and tech, wrapped up in a psychedelic scrapbook-esque presentation.

Dates will be decided on social media at the beginning of each month (or by my command decision if the schedule is tight) and a flyer will be created about a week in advance. Expect it to happen on a Weekend night around 4:30pst. You can tune in here if you're interested.

We hope to see you there!

2 page spread. page 1 contains event details and contrasts an angular cherry blossom design against a wavy festival banner in the foreground and a photograph of cherry trees in the background.
page 2. photos of a video camera lens and a cardcaptor sakura figure placed in opposition to each other. a circle is placed behind sakura to imply that the camera is looking at her. between the photos, text reads: Try not to panic. You’re being watched. Every second of every day, night, and morning, the camera is pointed at you. Its gaze is unrelenting and unforgiving. Your every micro-movement, micro-expression and micro-thought captured in the immortal medium of silicon and disseminated to the world in nano-zepto-yocto-seconds. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? In the chit-chatter when you return to a room, the dead fish eyed gaze on the bus, in the water-closet, the work-place. That piercing stare of glass and electronics, perceiving, ever perceiving. In time you even learned to see the feed yourself. To see your self through the uncaring, unfeeling, unempathizing eyes around you. Perceiving from outside became easier than from inside. And what is inside? Is there anything left, or is there only the camera? A recursive view, mirror to mirror, reflections of reflections stretching out into infinity in all directions…
2 page spread. page 1 contains event details and contrasts highly stylized plum blossoms against a processed photograph of a warbling white-eye bird.
page 2 features a photo of one of my dad's watches and a crossword, and also a lot of pseudointellectual filler text mainly hidden behind screengrabs of sae and hiro
A series of simple geometric shapes forming a pinecone, contrasted against a posterized photo of pine needles. A photograph of a y2k era flip phone draws the eye. Event information is displayed: Hidamari Sketch, Kareshi Kanojyo no Jijyo, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, and Super Gals! Kotobuki Ran. Sunday January twenty-sixth, at Cytu.be/r/onthismonthandthisevening. The journey begins anew!
A crossword puzzle. Black and grey shapes continue contours from the pinecone on the previous page. The crossword itself is positioned at a right angle to said shapes. Between the hints and the crossword is a connect the dots using a photo of a figure of Yuno from Hidamari, and behind that is a pseudointellectual ramble about the Heisei era. Gaps in the crossword are filled with posterized photos and flavor text.