Angel's Anime Rating Guide

Last week, I saw Primal on Cartoon Network ... Coming off an award-winning final season of Samurai Jack, Adult Swim reunites with creator Genndy Tartakovsky on a new animated series. Primal features a caveman at the dawn of evolution. A dinosaur on the brink of extinction. Bonded by tragedy, this unlikely friendship becomes the only hope of survival in a violent, primordial world. All Earth was but one thought... ...and that was death... Excerpt from the poem Darkness by Lord Byron (1788-1824).

After a visit to one of my favorite hangouts, I happened to hear about Dropkick On My Devil . According to Amazon ... Jashin-chan, a devil from Hell was abruptly summoned to the human world by Yurine Hanazono, a stoic college student who lives in a run-down apartment in Jinbocho. They're forced to become roommates since Yurine doesn't know how to send Jashin-chan back. But according to Jashin-chan, she could return by killing Yurine, so she takes action...?! A viperous roomie comedy that keeps you on your toes!

This weekend, I saw the theatrical release of Abominable ... When teenage Yi (Chloe Bennet, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) encounters a young Yeti on the roof of her apartment building in Shanghai, she and her mischievous friends, Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) and Peng (Albert Tsai), name him Everest and embark on an epic quest to reunite the magical creature with his family at the highest point on Earth. But the trio of friends will have to stay one-step ahead of Burnish (Eddie Izzard), a wealthy man intent on capturing a Yeti, and zoologist Dr. Zara (Sarah Paulson) to help Everest get home.

As soon as I had heard about this feature, I couldn't NOT watch MFKZ ... Featuring the voices of Michael Chiklis (The Shield, American Horror Story), Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad, The Usual Suspects), Jorge Gutierrez (The Book of Life, Son of Jaguar), Dascha Polanco (Orange is the New Black, Joy), RZA, Vince Staples, and Danny Trejo (Machete, Predators). Genre-mashup MFKZ is the collaboration of French comic artist Guillaume _Run_ Renard and ultra-hip Japanese animation house Studio 4C, creators of Tekkonkinkreet, Genius Party and Mind Game. The Tekkonkinkreet dream team of Shojiro Nishimi and art director Shinji Kimura reunite to bring to life a dark but stunningly animated sci-fi vision that mixes anime, film noir, and Lucha Libre in an orgy of video game-inspired mayhem. The film centers on young Angelino and his skull-and-flame pal Vinz, who live in a seedy tenement in an LA-inspired dystopian metropolis -- a burnt-out, gang and cockroach-ridden neo-urban hell. Follow...

I saw the Case Of Hana And Alice ... When Alice transfers to a new middle school, she hears an urban legend about a student who disappeared the previous year and is suspected to have been killed by his fellow students. Even worse, Alice discovers that she lives next door to his former house, a supposedly haunted home now occupied by a reclusive classmate named Hana. Hana and Alice decide to investigate this murder case together, but soon find their lack of detective skills may be an obstacle, in this unusual and charming film from famed writer-director Shunji Iwai, in which a shaggy-dog mystery tale ultimately gives way to a wonderfully nuanced story of young female friendship, and the fantasies and thrills of everyday teenage life.

Yesterday, I took the time to see Familiar Of Zero ... Season 1 Louise Francoise Le Blanc de La Valliere's name is so long and her spell-casting skills are so poor that everyone at the Tristain Academy of Magic just calls her Louise the Zero. Louise's humiliation only increases during an important second-year test, where the other students summon up dragons and other mythological creatures as their familiars, and she inexplicably summons Hiraga Saito, a totally normal teenager from Tokyo. Now she's stuck with him and Saito's stuck with the lousy life of being a familiar. Except, maybe there's more going on than meets the eye, because Saito's not prepared to accept the social inequities that Louise and other aristocrats consider the status quo, and he may not be quite as normal as everyone thinks. And the reason Louise is so bad at magic might just be that she hasn't figured out what she's good at yet. In fact, they might even have the makings of a gre...