It’s been six months since I became a regular weekly streaming reviewer at Anime News Network. Since August, I’ve written three episode reviews nearly every week, or about 70 episode reviews total!
Since I’m reviewing shows the day they come out, I don’t have a lot of time to evaluate the episode. Instead, I’ve come up with shortcuts to the kind of critical thinking necessary for reviewing media. Before I sit down to write, I ask myself questions that I think leads to the most useful reviews that people actually want to read.
These are the questions I use, and that I hope you’ll find helpful, too:
1. If you had to assign a grade to this show, what would it be?
Usually this is the first step I take in the review process. I go with my gut, and then try to explain all the reasons I felt compelled to give it that grade. You don’t have to put the grade on your review at the end, but it helps to keep it in mind while you’re writing.
2. What is the overarching theme?
Think of it this way: how would you describe what this show is about in one sentence? This is your opinion, and it will be the thesis statement of your entire review. For example, the thesis of my Mononoke review was that people are more terrifying than monsters.
3. Does it have a compelling story? Why or why not?
Did this show keep your attention? How did it accomplish this (or not)? Quick (or slow) pacing, relatable (or wooden) characters, and an interesting (or boring) plot may have contributed. Be careful that when you’re discussing the story, you don’t give the whole thing away!
4. How does this show use animation?
What was the cinematography like? Does it look computer animated or hand drawn? Were there any quirks of the camera angle or movement? For example, did it focus on one character’s perspective, zoom in or out, or jump cut from scene to scene?
5. How does this show use sound?
Was there a heavy musical score, or were there frequent silent spaces behind the dialogue? How did the music set the tone? Did any of the voice actors stand out as having an unusual vocal pattern, or a powerful emotional delivery?
6. Does this show remind you of another show?
The human brain is wired to make connections. I think it’s helpful to say, “You might like this if you liked X or Y because…” and then explain what they have in common.
7. How did this show make you feel and why?
When the credits rolled, were you left with a lingering feeling of happiness or sadness? Were you anxious due to a cliffhanger? Frustrated by an unanswered question? Some critics say emotions are unhelpful, but it’s really “I feel” statements that are unhelpful. In reality, emotions lend power to reviews when you can back them up with evidence from the show.
Interested in seeing some real life examples of how I use these questions? Check out my latest Anime News Network reviews:
Background photo by Daniel
9 Comments.
This is a great exercise for even established folks. If I had to make a list, it would work out something like this:
1) Who was this show made for and what does that imply about it? Both in terms of demographic and generation. (Shows like “Eden of the East” and “Terror in Resonance” would never have been made in the 1970s.)
2) What did it try to do and why? Did it achieve that, or achieve something else instead? Or fail entirely? This is also part and parcel of John Updike’s dictum that one should not flunk a piece of work for not achieving what it never set out to do in the first place — but also a note that sometimes a show sets out to do one thing and achieves another, unwittingly, not always for the good. (“Kill la Kill” begins as a high school fight story and mutates way the heck beyond that, all to the good.)
3) How does it use what it has to achieve its ends, or not? (Animation, sound, acting assets, FX, etc.) (“Redline” is all hand-drawn to give its production an idiosyncratic look and feel, one that hearkens back more to the maverick animation of the 1970s like Ralph Bakshi than other anime. It all works.)
4) What is the actual experience of watching the show like? Are you far more interested in it than you expected to be, or far less? (I thought “Ghost in the Shell: ARISE” was going to be far more interesting than it actually was, but the earlier “Stand Alone Complex” TV series never fails to grab me.)
5) Do you think your feelings about the show are an exception, or a rule? In other words, look at your feelings about it and try to examine how they would size up against another viewer’s feelings, especially a non-critical one. (I thought “The Wind Rises” was pure sentimentalism and hagiography, and further felt those were downright dangerous attitudes to bring to its subject. I suspect I might be in the minority there.)
6) What perspectives from your own experience can you bring to the table to talk about the work? This doesn’t have to be a confessional thing, just a way to enrich the review’s POV with something entirely yours.
7) What connections can you draw with other things? Not just other shows, but other books, other movies, other anything. It helps to start with what might be most familiar to the readers, but taking bigger leaps pays off, I find (e.g., comparing “Utsubora” to some of Georges Simenon’s thrillers).
I no longer give out grades or ratings for shows, in big part because I’ve found they rarely achieve their intended goal. Pass/fail, or watch/don’t watch is about as granular as I want to get — in big part because I feel the real discussions to be had around a show are much deeper than “Is it worth your time?” (Plus, I found that after a certain number of gradations, the ratings grow meaningless.) But it helps to at least say something in that vein, and I wouldn’t say that someone else giving out stars or numerical grades is doing it wrong.
@GenjiPress:disqus this really gives me a window into how you write your impressive reviews. 5 is very interesting. You should turn this into a blog post!
Seriously considering it! I banged all this off in the space of a couple of minutes, and I realize now it might make for a good resource unto itself.
I totally can’t do 4 or 5 because I haven’t watched enough anime to make a good call on those…though if they were manga-based & I’ve read the manga, I can comment.
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I have never written an anime review before because I don’t know how. I know I lack the descriptive words to uhh.. describe a show? All I know to say is that it’s great or bad. At times, I don’t know how to portray some things in the English language. I tried learning by reading anime reviews. But I guess, most of what I read are not really that great. Some anime reviewers just retell an episode without really having a point of view, while some reviews are full of curse words. Seriously, whenever I read a review full of curse words, it makes me think that the writer is crap himself/herself. Then I get tired of reading anime reviews because I have read the bad ones. Perhaps, I’ll learn from your anime reviews. Thank you very much.
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A very helpful article. I couldn’t find anything like it.