I like anime. Let me say that up front. But I've watched very little of it. When I was a kid, one of the local tv stations would sporadically play episodes of Dragon Ball Z and later we got Cardcaptor Sakura and a season of Escaflowne (that's not counting the unusual cases of Pokémon and Digimon). Buying anime was super expensive and we never had cable, so Toonami didn't help me when they started regularly airing cool stuff. I was able to get Akira from the library once. That was an interesting experience. And I torrented everything about Ghost in the Shell in college, later buying legit copies because Stand Alone Complex was just that good. But those were certainly exceptions.
These days anime is much easier to come by...but now I don't have the time to invest in it. Ugh. Plus the anime selections on Netflix and Amazon Prime are pretty lousy, let's be honest. But last month my wife tried out Hulu. We had Hulu right after we got married nearly six years ago but we dropped it pretty quickly because it was vastly inferior to Netflix (we weren't using it keep up with current shows; I know that was it's main selling point). But it has really come a long way in six years and basically doesn't suck anymore. Plus it's got the CG Ninja Turtles cartoon and my four-year-old has really gotten into that (it's surprisingly good).
ANYWAY, all that to say that I naturally took a look at their anime section and holy cow. It blows Netflix and Amazon out of the water on that front. Whereas those other services had one or two things that I might be interested in seeing, Hulu had gobs of stuff that I definitely want to watch. Since my wife is playing Mass Effect: Andromeda right now (like, as I sit here listening to music on my headphones and typing this) and I want to know nothing about that game ('cause I'm playing it next, 'natch), I decided to watch one of those Hulu animes.
I settled on a slow burn horror show called Another. It centers around a boy that has to transfer schools for one year while his father works out of the country. Everyone in his new class is friendly enough but they all totally ignore one of the female students. Our hero tries to strike up a friendship with her and unwittingly unleases a curse that has so far claimed the lives of three people. Or at least that is what it seems like so far. It's very mysterious. I've watched the first five episodes (of twelve) and while there have been three deaths, there have been no jump scares, no gruesome scenes. But my gosh, it's so creepy. There was an important reveal at the end of episode 5 and I was finally able to pull myself away since there wasn't a big cliffhanger at the end. I'm definitely anxious to find out what happens in the remainder of the series.
And, you know, after that maybe in some of these other anime shows I've been missing for so long.
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