Liv Writes Words Again

In the midst of something flawed, you can find a lot of the problems you start to struggle with in a piece can be looked past or seen kinder when the core theme or emotion delivered in a story is done well or with heart to it. And in many ways, Poco's Udon World feels like a case study of it. The story, ostensibly about a young man whose parents have passed, coming home to his abandoned childhood home and finding a tanuki boy in human form who he adopts and names Poco, is a show filled with a large amounts of small things or moments that bothered me over its run. Whether it's some characters acting in incredibly in your face ways that seem bizarre or downright rude for a show focused somewhat despite the magic premise on an emotional journey of rediscovery and memory. Some moments do speak of very bizarre and I use this term as a descriptor and as a trope, 'anime' means to set up conflict or infighting i.e. circumstances that are bizarre, born of in your face charac...

  It's hard to judge the value of a game for me. I base a lot of my own experiences around how something emotionally left me feeling. And it's easier to judge that scale when it's strong welled emotion or the absence of it. So it's odd but quite soothing that I can judge Super Crush K.O. as quite lovely, of high quality, of definitely being a fun experience while not really going one way or the other but simply maintaining a satisfying, quite tender content even as I went through it. Apart from flairs of irritation at myself not quite understanding each interaction and moments where the screen would get filled with things that my brain couldn't parse entirely, I never quite felt apart from once or twice it was truly the game's fault. Some small incidents began to make sense as I realized I had much more manoeuvrability then I initially considered as this side scrolling beat em 'up offers a special meter that allows you to do special moves which increase ...

  The early works of creators are things I'm always aware I need to be cautious about. It's an expectation as I go back in time, the preservation of media gets harder and some works can be rough around the edges or subject to flaws of the era. These are all things that made me more surprised when watching Gauche and noting both how well preserved this film is and beyond that, how incredibly breath taking it is. At its core, the plot of Gauche is perhaps the messiest thing about it. A young person struggling to fit in to the classical music band he's joined and to be a musician that can match the expectations of his conductor. His angry outbursts and frustration as he applies himself to music in what he thinks is the correct way to do it follow, while somewhat flawed in explaining quite the sense of every situation a resolutely beautiful story about letting yourself connect to others you may be resistant to, about how we can forge connections through music and that in its...