Month: December 2020

Miles Morales and his mom Rio just moved into a new apartment in Harlem. There’s still a lot to unpack in their rooms, and you can learn so much about them by looking around and examining their possessions. But the living room and kitchen are all put together, and Rio is going all-out to prepare a big Christmas dinner for herself, Miles, and a few family friends. It’s a heartwarming scene where you have to do a few chores like put on some music, light the Christmas tree, and make sure Ganke cleans up the damn mess he made spilling soup on the rug. What’s most important here is that it’s a rich display of culture, language, and food that celebrates the Morales’ Puerto Rican heritage.

Anyone who has played Spider-Man: Miles Morales will remember this part of the game–not necessarily for the fact that Miles has to get the power back on by using his Spidey skills while no one’s looking, but because it draws you into a cozy winter vibe of a snow-covered New York City. It’s a powerful moment of character building–you hear Miles and Rio speak Spanish to each other and you can see the Puerto Rican cuisine prepared and being cooked. It’s an invitation to see Miles’ Boricua roots first hand, and a striking piece of representation for those who share Boricua roots or relate through other Latin-American cultures, all over a nice dinner for the holidays. And for me, after I spoke to my mom to let her know I couldn’t come home for Christmas this year, these moments in the game became much more bittersweet.

As I walked through that scene, it reminded me of home and my mom, a reflection of the 20-plus years in the past I spent with her during Christmastime. Rio is on the phone speaking Spanish while she’s cooking, just like how my mom would talk chismis in Tagalog over the phone with my aunties, acting like I wouldn’t understand what she was saying. Some of the food you see on the counter and being cooked closely resembles Filipino dishes I always had growing up, too.

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From volleyball boys to sentient video game villains, these are the anime we loved in 2020.

2020 was a bit of an oddball year for anime, with COVID-19 causing several shows and movies to be delayed while a few others were split into parts, with the first half releasing early in the year and the second half debuting months later. But we still managed to get quite a few gems.

In the following article, we detail the six anime that really stood out to us in 2020. We loved them for different reasons–some, like Great Pretender, left us on the edge of our seats with its fast pacing and dramatic cliffhangers while others, like My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom, provided a welcome amount of hilarity in an occasionally bleak year.

Next, check out some of our other best-of-2020 lists:

• TV Shows and Movies You May Have Missed
• The Best Netflix Exclusives of 2020
• The Best Streaming Services of 2020
• The Biggest Disappointments in Entertainment This Year
• The Biggest Entertainment Controversies of 2020

Great Pretender

Great Pretender is a colorful and wacky anime about a group of con artists working together to swindle the wealthy corrupt. The show features a loveable protagonist in Makoto Edamura, a Japanese swindler who’s just trying to find happiness in a normal life, and a great deal of Great Pretender is spent hoping he’ll manage to break free of the charismatic but manipulative Laurent Thierry while silently admitting that Edamura fits in well with Laurent’s crew of outlaws.

To the anime’s benefit, the whole season is split into small arcs, each of which only lasts for a few episodes and focuses on a different heist. So instead of one long drawn-out story, Great Pretender is several different stories, each of which focus on developing a new villain and providing additional insight into one of the members of the crew of antiheroes that the show follows.

This is all paid off in the show’s final arc, which reveals that there’s actually been a narrative throughline for the anime this entire time–looks like you, the viewer, were even being conned. It’s not as mind-boggling a reveal as that seen in the most esteemed of anime dramas, but it is a rather clever bit of meta storytelling to trick the viewer into further emphasizing with Edamura as we see that Laurent has been manipulating and conning us this whole time as well.

Haikyu: To The Top

Haikyu returned in 2020 for a fourth season, introducing a brand-new subhead and animation style with it. The fourth season played to both strengths of the shonen volleyball series, as it’s split into two distinct halves that are each satisfying in their own way.

The first half of To The Top felt like Haikyu Season 2, in that it slowed down and focused on the internal development of its characters–namely protagonists Hinata and Kagayama. The second half (which focused entirely on a single volleyball game like Season 3) payed off that development in a rewarding way, in that we got to see how Hinata, Kagayama, and the rest of their team had improved to the point that they could take on Inarizaki High School and the powerful duo of the Miya brothers.

Few sports anime are as popular as Haikyu and To The Top is a good reminder of why. The show doesn’t rely on superheroic levels of play to make it exciting, it establishes what each character is capable of and then delivers on a story where the stakes feel very real. And thanks to the new animation style, Haikyo: To The Top implements incredibly detailed facial expressions, which allows viewers to better understand a character’s train of thought or emotional state during the fleeting seconds of a rally.

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War Season 2

Misunderstandings are usually one of the most annoying tropes in romantic comedies; it seems like many shows and movies in this genre rely on them for the crux of their plot to manufacture drama. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War works so well because it instead relies on misunderstandings for the basis of its comedy. In this anime, student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice-president Kaguya Shinomiya are both crushing hard on each other, but both believe that if they admitted their feelings, the other would tease them for it.

It’s such a straightforward premise, but Kaguya-sama: Love is War stretches this one misunderstanding out into a collection of some of the funniest comedy sketches in its first season, and manages to do so again in Season 2. The introduction of new characters initially seems counter-intuitive given the charisma of the existing cast, but the newcomers seamlessly worm into the established back-and-forth, creating new avenues of comedy.

The show’s strength–especially in Season 2–is definitely its willingness to slowly build up to a punchline. Though each skit is self-contained, there are occasional throughlines for a few of them, resulting in jokes that have been building all season long. You don’t really notice it until the punchline lands, but when it does it almost always hits.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken

Few anime explore the concept of creating anime, and even less manage to do so with the same level of charm and attention to detail as Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. This comedy sees anime-lover Midori Asakusa, money-hungry Sayaka Kanamori, and socialite Tsubame Mizusaki joining forces to create a club at their high school for creating anime.

Though its plotlines are usually played for laughs, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken excels for leaning into and exploring the creative process behind anime–both the fun aspects that attract creatives like group brainstorming, as well as the less glamorous parts of the business like work crunch and funding. Both Midori and Tsubame dream of becoming professionals in the anime sphere while Sayaka is the realist, typically reigning in the expectations of the other two.

Because at the end of the day, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is an anime about making anime, not an anime about making your dreams come true. Reality is often much harsher than what you’ve imagined. It’s not all doom and gloom of course–this probably wouldn’t have been one of our favorite anime of the year if that had been the case–but Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is special because it’s willing to tackle and discuss the often glossed over hardships of working in the anime business while still delivering a wonderful narrative of why people still want to pursue such a career path anyway.

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising

Before theaters shut down, a few anime movies managed to have their theatrical release. Among them was My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising. And what a movie! Though its ending falls a little flat by finding a way to conveniently erase what would have been an incredibly cool and fulfilling plot development, the movie up to that point contains some of the best action sequences that My Hero Academia has ever had. In Heroes Rising, Class 1-A is sent to an island to temporarily run its hero agency and get some experience in preparation for their futures as professional superheroes. Things are running smoothly until the island is attacked by a mysterious masked man and his followers, who cut off communications. This forces Class 1-A to protect the island and its citizens without the assistance of any adult heroes.

Heroes Rising succeeds where Two Heroes largely doesn’t in that it leans into My Hero Academia’s biggest selling point: it’s an anime about a class of students, not just one person. Two Heroes largely focuses on main protagonist Izuku Midoriya, and incorporates scenes that focus on a select group of his fellow Class 1-A students. Heroes Rising, on the other hand, gives pretty much every member of Class 1-A a chance to shine. Midoriya and his rival Katsuki Bakugo are definitely the stars, but the others participate in some impressive stand-out battles as well.

More than anything, Heroes Rising drives at the underlying message of My Hero Academia that’s been slowly explored in the show since Season 3: That All Might’s ideal of one prominent hero standing as the symbol of peace is fundamentally flawed, and that it would be much better if a group of heroes stood side-by-side as symbols of peace. In Heroes Rising, you begin to see the start of such an idea bear fruit, as Class 1-A bands together to defeat a group of powerful supervillains. None of them could have succeeded on their own, but together they’re a formidable force.

My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom

My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom is a very lengthy title for a short and sweet anime. The anime follows a young woman reborn as Katarina Claes, the villainess of a video game where the good ending results in Katarina’s exile and the bad ending leads her to be killed. Wanting to avoid both possibilities, Katarina works to befriend the game’s heroine and the other characters, scheming for an ending where she gets to live.

The result is an incredibly wholesome show about a girl who is so laughably dense that she doesn’t realize that she’s managed to make practically all her friends–both the men and women–fall madly in love with her. In Katarina’s own mind, she’s convinced that everyone still sees her as a villain who’s doomed to be exiled or killed one day, while those around her fruitlessly continue to pine for her affections. It’s all hilarious.

This is one of those anime where you can just sit down, start an episode, and know that no matter how bleak things might seem for Katarina, the truth is that she’s overthinking practically everything and nothing but good things are going to come her way. Admittedly, that does mean that the show has extremely low stakes, but in a year like 2020, getting an anime like My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom was a refreshingly funny watch.

Full spoilers follow for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 11. Read our review of Discovery Season 3, Episode 10 for where we left off.

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Wow, who would’ve thought that a holodeck-malfunction episode would prove to be the strongest outing to date for Discovery Season 3? Though technically, the holographic environment in “Su’Kal” isn’t malfunctioning because of the usual old TNG-era reasons, but rather because it’s been doing what it was designed to do for over a century and is finally just falling apart from wear and tear.

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That the revelation of what caused The Burn is also finally provided to us here — or at least seems to be — and that it wasn’t some evil aliens behind that devastating event, but rather just what must’ve been a lost and scared child, is part of the appeal of this hour. (I’m guessing that it was the death of Su’Kal’s mother that prompted him to trigger The Burn, but we’ll have to wait until at least next week to find out if that’s correct or not.) But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There’s a lot crammed into this week’s cold open, including: picking up right where we left off at the Goodbye Georgiou Cocktail Hour; the return of a sheepish Gray (Ian Alexander) — let’s face it, being a dead Trill that no one can see aside from your ex must be a bummer; the reveal that it must be a Kelpien child who has somehow survived on the ship that’s been stranded in the Verubin Nebula; Saru (Doug Jones) almost risking the ship unnecessarily; Book getting radiation sickness while probing the area; and the discovery of a dilithium planet inside the nebula. All before the opening credits!

Yeah, they’re doing a lot in this hour, but it winds up feeling like a true “planet of the week” (or two weeks, as the case may be) Star Trek story that also ties seamlessly in with the season’s bigger arc. One issue I’ve had with the show this year has been its quest-style storylines, where the crew would have to find one clue each week that would get them a little closer to solving the mystery of The Burn. But now, with just three episodes left to the season, we’re finally getting to the nitty-gritty of it all.

An away team consisting of Saru, Burnham (Sonequa Michael-Green), and Dr. Culber (Wilson Cruz) heads down to look for the “child,” who is certainly not going to be a child at this point. But as it turns out, Su’Kal may be a century old or more, but he has the mind of a child essentially. Played by the great Bill Irwin, Su’Kal has spent most of his life on his ship’s holodeck, which was programmed by his mother to raise him and school him as best it could. Over time, as the ship’s condition has deteriorated in the dangerous environment of the nebula, the holographic babysitters and teachers have become glitchy even as Su’Kal has lost his grasp on what’s real and what isn’t — if he ever had a grasp that is.

It’s not that he doesn’t know that he’s interacting with holos, but when confronted by the Disco trio — real, live people — he can’t comprehend it, so much so that Michael must pretend to be a holo. And on top of that, the entire, vast holographic realm is inhabited by ghostly beings which may or may not be real. The environment, the creatures, and even the specific tics of the malfunctioning holograms all combine to make for an episode with a distinct feel and a huge scope.

This holo-framework also gives the Disco team the chance to mix things up on the makeup front, making Burnham a Trill, Culber a Bajoran, and Saru… a human. It’s a fun twist to the episode to see the gang with these looks, and Doug Jones surely loved shooting this episode and not having to put the Kelpien rubber on. But he’s still Saru no matter how human he looks.

Which doesn’t mean that Saru is a great captain, because he increasingly seems to not be. Sure, this mission means a lot to him on a deeper level because of the Kelpien Su’Kal, but his hesitancy at making decisions and his inability to see the forest for the trees on both the bridge and the away mission is damning. Does Burnham become captain by the end of this season at this rate? I wouldn’t rule it out. That said, Jones has some great moments, as when he cuddles up next to the lullaby-singing Kelpien grandfather, or even just the look in his eyes when he first encounters Su’Kal.

Meanwhile, Tilly (Mary Wiseman) takes the center seat as acting Captain, and she does really well even after Osyraa (Janet Kidder) shows up. But when Su’Kal activates his almost-Burn, it messes everything up for the Discovery and the ship is overtaken in no time by Osyraa’s forces. Seeing her actually one-up our heroes makes the Emerald Chain’s leader feel like a true threat, which hasn’t really been the case yet this season, and what do you know? We even wind up with a cliffhanger by episode’s end. Mr. Worf… fire!

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Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• I wonder how Aditya Sahil is doing over on that Federation relay station. We haven’t seen him since the first episode of this season. I sure hope Burnham doesn’t forget to loop him in on things.
• Admiral Vance: Not a fan of Tilly as Acting Captain.
• Stamets’ not wanting Culber to go on the away team makes sense, sort of. They are Starfleet though, and risk is part of the game.
• Michael’s advice to Tilly about taking the conn and using that metal burr under the captain’s chair’s armrest is a nice touch. Captain Georgiou’s memory lives on.
• Presumably those ghost-like creatures are actually what’s left of the Kelpien crew, right?
• Can we talk about the Orions’ chins?

Netflix is bringing some holiday cheer with the announcement that Season 3 of Cobra Kai will premiere globally on January 1, 2021, which is one week earlier than originally reported.

Here’s how Netflix describes the upcoming season of Cobra Kai: “Season 3 finds everyone reeling in the aftermath of the violent high school brawl between their dojos, which has left Miguel in a precarious condition. While Daniel searches for answers in his past and Johnny seeks redemption, Kreese further manipulates his vulnerable students with his own vision of dominance. The soul of the Valley is at stake, and the fate of every student and sensei hangs in the balance.”

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The streamer also released a clip of Johnny (William Zabka) personally changing Cobra Kai’s Season 3 release date to January 1. You can check out the video right here.

In case you missed the first two seasons of Cobra Kai, which aired on YouTube Premium before Netflix acquired the series, you can binge Seasons 1 and 2 right now on Netflix before Season 3 debuts.

For more on the series, be sure to check out our reviews of Cobra Kai Season 1 and Cobra Kai Season 2.

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David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.

With 2021 upon us, the Generation Next gang discuss the games they’re looking forward to playing on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 next year.

If you’ve been waiting for the sweet embrace of a new season of Cobra Kai, and you’re counting down the days until January 8, 2021, then stop counting because that’s no longer the release date for the new season. Netflix has announced Season 3 of Cobra Kai will land on January 1, 2021. To celebrate the release, Netflix has a new video featuring Johnny Lawrence using a computer.

That’s right, you’ll be able to strike hard, strike fast with no mercy as you click “play” as hard as possible on your controller–possibly breaking it. Earlier this month, the first trailer arrived for the new season–which had its first two season premieres on YouTube Premium before moving to Netflix earlier this year. The end of Season 2 left one person in the hospital and a local high school torn apart–literally–as a karate riot saw students from Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence’s dojos at each other’s throats.

In addition to the earlier release date, Netflix has announced that the cast of Cobra Kai will join The Netflix Afterparty on January 2, to discuss the third season with hosts David Spade, Fortune Feimster, and London Hughes.

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